Google’s 2025 Challenge: CEO Sundar Pichai’s Urgent Message to Employees!

Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, warned staff last week that “the stakes are high” for the firm in 2025 due to heightened competition, legal obstacles, and the rapid breakthroughs in artificial intelligence.

According to audio obtained by CNBC, Pichai and other Google executives, dressed in ugly holiday sweaters, pumped up the upcoming year at a 2025 strategy meeting on December 18, particularly as it relates to what is coming in AI.

According to Pichai, 2025 will be crucial. “As a corporation, we must move more quickly and comprehend the importance of this time,” I believe. The stakes are really high. These are times of disruption. We must remain steadfastly committed to maximizing the advantages of this technology and resolving actual user issues by 2025.

While some employees participated electronically, others attended the meeting in person at Google’s Mountain View, California, headquarters.

Following a year filled with some of the most intense scrutiny Google has faced since going public twenty years ago, Pichai made these remarks. Strong revenue growth was generated by areas like search advertisements and cloud, but competition increased in Google’s key businesses, and the corporation encountered internal issues like cultural conflicts and doubts about Pichai’s long-term goals.

And there is more regulation than ever before.

A federal judge said in August that Google unlawfully has a monopoly in the search industry. In November, the Justice Department requested that Google be compelled to sell off its Chrome division. The DOJ accused the business of unlawfully controlling online ad technology in a different instance. The trial ended in September and is pending a judge’s decision.

In the same month, Google’s ad tech practices were the subject of a statement of complaints from Britain’s competition authority, which the agency considered to be having an effect on competition in the United Kingdom.

“I am aware that we are under international scrutiny,” Pichai stated. It is a result of our success and size. It fits into a larger pattern where technology is now having a significant impact on society. Therefore, now more than ever, we must be careful not to become sidetracked.

A Google representative chose not to respond.

Although Google’s search division continues to hold a large portion of the market, generative AI has opened up a plethora of new avenues for users to obtain information online and has also introduced a number of new rivals.

The hype cycle was started by OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022, and since then, investors like Microsoft have helped the business grow to a $157 billion valuation. OpenAI declared in July that it would introduce its own search engine. Perplexity, which just concluded a $500 million fundraising round at a $9 billion valuation, is also marketing its AI-powered search engine.

Google is making significant investments in an effort to maintain its leadership position, primarily through its AI model, Gemini. Among the many features available to customers through the Gemini app is Google’s chatbot.

“Building big, new business” is a primary objective, according to Pichai. The Gemini app is one of them; according to officials, it will be Google’s next app to surpass half a billion users. At the moment, 15 of the company’s apps have achieved that goal.

“There is a lot of momentum with the Gemini app, especially in the last few months,” Pichai stated. “However, there is still work to be done in 2025 to bridge the gap and take the lead there as well.”

“Next year, our primary focus will be scaling Gemini on the consumer side,” Pichai subsequently stated.

“You do not have to be first all the time.”

Pichai displayed a graphic of huge language models at the meeting, showing that Gemini 1.5 outperformed OpenAI’s GPT and other rivals.

Pichai stated, “I anticipate some back and forth” in 2025. “I believe we will be cutting edge.”

“Google has had to play catch-up,” he admitted.

According to him, “in history, you do not always need to be first; you just need to execute well and be the best in class as a product.” “I believe that is the main focus of 2025.”

Questions submitted by staff members via Google’s internal system were reviewed by executives. One commenter asked, “What is our plan to combat this in the following year?,” implying that ChatGPT “is becoming synonymous to AI the same way Google is to search,” as Pichai read aloud the message. Or are we not giving consumer-facing LLM as much attention?

Pichai looked to Demis Hassabis, a co-founder of DeepMind, for the answer. He stated that teams will “turbo charge” the Gemini app and that the business has observed an increase in the number of users since the app’s February introduction. “Over the next year or two, the products themselves are likely to evolve dramatically,” he said.

A universal assistant that “can smoothly work over any domain, any modality, or any device” was the idea Hassabis presented.

The first half of the year will see updates to Project Astra, Google’s May announcement of its experimental universal assistant.

Whether Google can scale AI products without charging $200 a month “like other companies” was the subject of another employee query.

Hassabis replied, “At this time, we do not have any plans for this kind of subscription level.” He also said he believes Gemini Advanced’s $20 monthly fee is a fair price. “There are currently no plans for that, but I would not say never.”

Josh Woodward, the head of Google Labs, was invited to the stage by Google towards the end of the meeting. The Zombie Nation song “Kernkraft 400” was playing loudly in the background when he took the microphone.

Known for his great energy, Woodward declared, “I am going to try to do six demos in eight minutes.”

Woodward began by introducing Jules, a coding aid included in the program of a reliable tester. “It is where software development is headed in the future,” he remarked.

After that, Woodward switched to NotebookLM, an AI note-taking app that got a number of improvements in 2024, including a podcasting capability. Woodward gave an example of how the business is experimenting with a new feature that lets users “phone in” to podcasts.

He then discussed Project Mariner, a Chrome addon that uses AI to multitask. Woodward requested that the Maps app incorporate the best eateries from Tripadvisor. Employees in attendance erupted in cheers after the demo was successfully completed after a brief pause.

Pichai reminded staff members again throughout the meeting to “remain scrappy.” In 2023, Google laid off over 6% of its employees as part of a massive cost-cutting campaign that also kept efficiency as a top priority.

Alphabet had 181,269 workers at the end of the third quarter, which was almost 5% fewer than at the end of 2022.

Pichai once made reference to Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, who founded the business 26 years ago—long before cloud computing or artificial intelligence capabilities were invented.

Pichai remarked, “If you look at how the founders of Google created our data centers in the early days, they were really incredibly scrappy in every move they made.” “Creativity frequently results from limitations. Headcount is not necessarily the answer to every issue.