Google CEO Sundar Pichai on the next phase of AI
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Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil I. Patel, Editor-in-Chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems.

This week, I'm talking to Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai. In what's becoming a little bit of a decoder tradition, we spoke in person after the big Google I/O developer conference. This is the third year in a row that Sundar's been on Decoder after I/O, and this one felt really different. Google's in a very confident place right now, and you can really feel that in this conversation. If you caught any of the news from I/O, you know why. Google announced a huge new set of AI products that are shipping imminently, not just models and capabilities.

Sundar told me that these products represent a new phase of the AI platform shift. And we talked about that at length, how that shift is playing out, what the markers of these phases are, and whether any of these products can actually deliver a return on the huge investments that Google has been making in AI over the years. I/O also marked the beginning of what appears to be a new era for search in the web. Google's new vision for search goes well beyond links to web pages to something that feels a lot more like custom app development.

When you search for something, Google's AI mode will build you a custom search results page, including interactive charts and potentially other kinds of apps in real time. You can see the beginnings of that vision in the new AI mode right now. One of the big announcements that I owe is the AI mode is now available to all US users. And the plan is to graduate features from AI mode into the main search experience over time.

I wanted to know how Sundar was thinking about that graduation process, and really how he thinks that will affect the web itself, which right now is shaped more than anything by the incentives of Google search and SEO. You'll hear Sundar say in several different ways that he believes the web is still getting bigger and that Google is sending more traffic to more websites than ever before.

But the specifics of that are hotly contested. Just before he and I spoke, the News Media Alliance, the trade group that represents publishers like Condé Nast, The New York Times, and the Virgis Parent Company, Vox Media, issued what can only be described as a furious statement calling AI mode, quote, theft. So, of course, we talked about that too. And what happens to the web when AI tools and eventually agents do most of the browsing for us? What does it mean for the web to go from a series of websites that people look at,

to just a series of databases that AI agents make use of? And even more importantly, why would companies like Uber or DoorDash or Airbnb allow their businesses to be commoditized in that way? If you've been listening to the show, you know that I've been talking about this idea a lot. And so Sundar and I spent some real time here. It was a very decoder conversation. Of course, we also talked about Android XR and the smart glasses Google announced at I.O. and when the next era of AI hardware might arrive.

I also asked Sundar what he thinks of the big OpenAI Johnny Ive deal that was announced just before we spoke. And I couldn't let this conversation go without asking him if the major antitrust trials Google's involved in, including the government's demand that Google sell Chrome, and what negotiations with the Trump DOJ have involved so far. President Trump has long complained about his search results being too negative, but Sundar told me he will not change search rankings in response to political pressure, calling search sacrosanct.

There's a lot in this one. I'm eager to hear what you all think about it. And as a bonus, you can also watch the full video on the Verge's YouTube channel. So check that out if you'd like. Okay, Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai. Here we go. Sundar Pichai, you're the CEO of Alphabet and Google. Welcome back to Decoder. Hello, good to be back. Feels like a nice tradition post-IO to be talking to you, so good to be back. I think this is the third year we've done this after IO. I'm excited. Thank you for keeping the tradition alive. Yeah.

Lots to talk about. You announced a lot of things yesterday during the keynote. There's AI mode rolling out for US users, big updates to Gemini. There's VO3 and Imagine, the generators. You solved Pokemon with robots, which is very exciting. You know, my takeaway yesterday was that Google feels very confident now. There's a real confidence about the technology coming to life and the products. A lot of things are shipping imminently.

What's the one piece that gave you that confidence? Is it just the volume of things that are shipping? Is it one technology that clicked into being ready for consumers? Where is it coming from? Look, I think it comes from the depth and breadth of the AI frontier we are pushing in a more fundamental and foundational way. We spoke a lot about this theme called research becomes reality, but it is

You know, we've always felt we're a deep computer science company and, you know, we've been AI first for a while. So putting all that together and bringing it to our products at the depth and breadth is what I think it's really pleasing to see. For example, people may not have noticed it much. It was so quick. We spoke about text diffusion models in the middle of the whole thing.

but we're pushing the frontier on all dimensions. Demis spoke about world models. I think to me that's the exciting part, how deep we are pushing this frontier and then bringing it to users. Maybe that's what makes it feel that way. You mentioned research into reality several times. Obviously, a lot of these projects have been cooking in labs for a long time. You've said many times you think AI will be as profound as electricity over the past many years that you and I have talked about it.

But you said something yesterday that I think adds to that, which is that we're in a new phase of the platform shift, right? And people have talked about AI being a platform shift for quite a while. That always has meant to me that there's a user interface platform shift coming, right? We're going to interact with computers in natural language and more natural ways, and they will interact with us back in that same way, and everything will change. Is that the platform shift? You are right. Each of these platform shifts changes many things on the I.O. front, right?

Nothing to do with Google I/O, just I/O in the traditional computer science sense. You could feel it. Yesterday when I watched the Android XR, I've used them and played around with them. But watching it, two people talking in different languages, you can envision the future one day where it'll actually be seamless. In a way, you couldn't have done it with phones. You couldn't have done it without AI because there's nothing in your way. You're looking at the other person and talking, right?

That is an element of platform shift, but there are many more elements, right? This is the only platform where I think the actual platform is over time capable of creating and self-improving and so on. In a way, we could have never talked about any other platform before. So that's why I think it's much more profound than the other platform shifts.

It'll allow people to create new things in a way, you know, because at each layer of the stack, there's going to be profound improvements. And so I think that virtuous cycle you get in terms of how you can unleash new

this creative power to all of society, be it software engineers, be it creators. I think that is going to happen in a much more multiplicative way. And that, you know, so when I say it's a next phase, I'm talking about that part too. Let me just make that more concrete for people. I think the last platform shift we all understand is the shift to mobile.

And that was, right, we're going to have multi-touch, we're going to have faster cell connections, we're going to increase processing power that can go with you everywhere. And then there was a layer of applications that was enabled by all of those things. You can push a button and a Toyota Camry will show up wherever you are in the world. It's like a very powerful thing that required all of those ideas. How would you describe the phase we're in now compared to that?

Because the first phase of AI was the Transformers work and the models work, and we can all see this capability. The second phase, what is it to you? Just imagine when the internet came, blogging became a thing. Pre-internet, very few people had a means by which they could put out their thoughts out to the world. When the internet came, a new medium, it allowed people to create and express themselves in a new way.

with mobile game cameras and you could shoot and like, you know, you could create videos, you know, look at what's happened with YouTube. For me, the similar part of this is, you know, we're all talking about things like vibe coding. Yesterday you saw VO3, right? So we are now in that phase. I think people are going to be able to create AI applications, you can call it, but

There are many names to it, but that power is yet to be unleashed. You're barely scratching the surface, right? And these models are now, they aren't quite there. You can kind of do one-shot coding, but you really need to know, be a programmer to kind of go iterate and create something with polish, right? But that frontier is evolving pretty rapidly. So I think you're gonna see a new wave of things just like mobile did, just the internet did.

I came to Google at the time when there was Ajax was the revolution. The fact that the web became dynamic, you had things like Google Maps, Flickr, Gmail, all that suddenly came into existence. But I think AI is going to turbocharge in a way we haven't seen before.

It feels to me like what you're describing is we're in the phase where the products are developed, right? The capabilities were the first phase, and now we're going to make some actual products. And more people can build products than ever before. That's the multiplicative part I'm talking about. Not just this platform helps you create more products. The process of creating, developing, et cetera, is going to be accessible to a much wider swath of humanity than ever before. I'm wondering when you look at the landscape of products that exist now, most people experience AI in Gemini or...

ChatGPT as a chatbot, the general purpose interface to a bunch of knowledge that we'll talk to you. What products do you see that will have the same kind of impact as the Web2 products you were talking about besides the general purpose chatbot?

Obviously, you've seen a wave with coding IDEs, right? Like, you know, that entire landscape is, I can't even keep track of, you know, how many new companies have come into and people are using a lot of it, right? And yesterday we showed a bunch of partners with whom we are working. So that's an area where, because coding is where maybe AI is making the most progress, you're seeing the application later, at least in terms of code editors, really come into vogue.

We've had success with Notebook LM. We're launching products like Flow yesterday. Flow is a new product which allows you to create and imagine. So those are all applications we are doing. I think others are beginning to do. People are working on legal assistance and there are all kinds of startups. I was recently in a doctor's office and

They do have AI kind of look at it, I mean, transcribe the whole thing, put it all in reports and so on. That's an enterprise application layer, kind of completely works different than when I went to that visit

two years ago. So all that change is happening across the board, but I think we are just in the early stages. So you will see it play out over the next three to five years in a big way. - Did you ask your doctor what model their transcription software is running? - No, I didn't. No, I didn't, yeah. - One of the reasons I'm asking this and I'm pushing on this is the amount of huge investment in the capability from Google and others has to pay off in some products that return on that investment. Notebook LM is great,

I don't think it's going to fully return on Google's data center investment, let alone the investment in pure AI research. Do you see a product that can return on that investment at scale? Look, do you think in 2004, if you looked at Gmail, which was a 20% project which people were internally using as an email service,

How would we be able to think about Gmail is what led us to do workspace, get into the enterprise. I made a big bet on Google Cloud, which is tens of billions of dollars in revenue today. My point is, things build out over time. Think about the journey we have been with Waymo. I think one of the mistakes people make often in a period of rapid innovation is,

think about what is that next big business versus looking at the underlying innovation and say, can you build something and put out something which people love and use? And out of which you do the next thing and create value out of it. So when I look at it, AI is such a horizontal piece of technology across our entire business. It's why, I mean, it impacts not just Google search, YouTube, cloud,

all of Android. You saw XR, et cetera, Google Play, things like Waymo, Isomorphic, which is based on AlphaFold. So I've never seen one piece of technology which can impact and help us create so many businesses. And, you know, AI is going to be so useful as an assistant. I think that people will be willing to pay for it. We are introducing subscription plans. So there's a lot of

you know, headroom ahead, I think. And obviously that's why we are investing because we see that opportunity. Some of it will take time and it may not be always immediately obvious. You know, I gave the Waymo example. In fact, the sentiment on Waymo was quite negative three years ago. You know, but I actually, you know, as a company, we increased our investment into Waymo at that time, right? Because you're betting on the underlying technology and you're seeing the progress of where it's going. But these are good questions, right? In some ways,

If you don't realize the opportunities that may constrain the pace of investment in this area, but I'm optimistic we'll be able to unlock new opportunities. We have to take a quick break. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Sophos.

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Welcome back. I'm speaking with Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Right before the break, I was asking him how he eventually plans to get a return on all of this AI investment. And it is definitely a lot of investment. And that set us up to discuss some of the new hardware Google showed off at I.O. this year.

One reason I wanted to start here as the foundation of the conversation is you showed off Android XR yesterday. You showed off some prototype glasses. You have some partners making glasses. A lot of people think augmented reality glasses powered by AI will be the realization of the full platform shift, right? You will have an always-on assistant that can look at the world around you. You showed some of those demos yesterday. The form factor will change. The interface will change. This will be a market as big as smartphones were. How close do you think we are to that as a mainstream product?

It was a nice reflective moment all the way back from Google Glass. Wearing the product, I think there's a difference between goggles and glasses. Everyone at Verge understands this as well, but obviously we are also shipping goggles. We have announced products with Samsung to come later this year. On the XR side, I think I'm excited about our partnership with Gentle Monster and Warby Parker. We'll have products in the hands of developers this year.

But I think those products will be pretty close to what people will eventually see as final products. So I'm excited. I think the pace is actually pretty palpable. So I'd be shocked if you and I were sitting next year

I wasn't wearing one of that when I'm doing the- - Do you think that will be like a mainstream iPhone level replacement product? 'Cause there's a lot of hardware that needs to get developed along the way to pull that off. - Look, you're wearing something on your face, people like I have prescription, right? And you know,

the bar is higher, I think, in terms of making the experience seamless enough that you're willing to wear it in your face and enjoy it for all. So I don't think Nestle next year is as mainstream as what you're talking about, but would millions of people be trying it? I think so. Yeah. So both are true, I think. So I have to ask you, just before we sat down, OpenAI announced that Johnny Ive was selling a company he had started called IO to the company in

I've and his design consultancy love from would take over all design. They didn't announce a product, but they said it's the future of computing and it's coming next year. Is do you anticipate more of that competition that

Your competitors who don't have a smartphone operating system will go even harder in this direction? I'm looking forward to an open I.O. announcement ahead of Google I.O. the night before. First of all, look, stepping back, I mean, Johnny Ive is, you know, one of a kind. You know, you look at this track record over the years, I've definitely met him only once or twice, but, you know, I've admired his work, obviously, like so many of us. So I think it's exciting, shows...

This is why I feel like there's so much innovation ahead. And I think people tend to underestimate this moment. In some ways, people tend to, I always like to point out when the internet happened, Google didn't even exist. So when you think about, I think AI is gonna be bigger than the internet.

there are going to be companies, products, categories created, which we aren't aware of today. So I think the future looks exciting. I think there's a lot of opportunity to innovate around hardware form factors at this moment with this platform shift. So I'm looking forward to seeing what they do. We are going to be doing a lot as well. And I think it's an exciting time to be a consumer. It's an exciting time to be a developer. So I think looking forward to it.

I've in that video described the phone and the laptop as legacy platforms, which is very interesting considering his own history. Are you all the way there that the phone and laptop are legacy platforms? Look, I think these things, if anything, I found through this AI moment using the web a lot more, right? Because it's easier to create a VO3 video on my browser and a big screen.

And so the way I've internalized this is computing will be available and like you don't have to make these hard choices. You know, computing will become so essential to you. You're going to have it in multiple ways around you when you need it. Right. Like I use a phone, a tablet, a laptop, and I have my workstation. Right. And so I have the breadth of it. But, you know, over time, it makes sense to me.

At some point in the future, consuming content by pulling out this black glass display rectangle in front of you and looking at it is not the most intuitive way to do it. But I think it's going to take some time.

I feel like we could do a full hour just on Android tablets and where they could go. We're going to come back for that. A big part of what you're describing implicates search in really big ways, right? We're going to be surrounded by information. Search or Gemini or some future Google product will organize that information, take action for you across the web in some way, and you will have a companion. And maybe you only pull out your tablet to watch a video or something.

A lot of what's going on with search has downstream effects on the web, downstream effects on information providers broadly. Are you starting, last year we spent a lot of time talking about those effects. Are you seeing that play out the way that you thought it would? It depends. I do think people are consuming a lot more information. And, you know, web is one specific format. So we should talk about the web, but zooming back out.

There are new platforms like YouTube and others too. So I think people are just consuming a lot more information, right? So it feels like an expansionary moment. I think there are more creators, people are putting out more content, you know, and so people are generally doing a lot more. Maybe people have a little extra time in their hands. And so it's a combination of all that.

On the web, look, things which have been interesting and, you know, we've had these conversations for a while. You know, obviously in 2015, there was this famous, the web is dead. I always have it somewhere around, you know, which I look at it once in a while. Predictions, it's existed for a while. I think the web is evolving pretty profoundly. I think that is true. When we crawl, when we look at the number of web pages available to us, that number has gone up by 45% in the last two years alone.

So that's a staggering thing to think about. Can you detect if that number, if that volume increase is because more pages are generated by AI or not? This is the thing I may be worried about the most. It's a good question. We generally have many techniques in search to try and understand the quality of a page, including whether it was machine generated, etc. This trend, that doesn't explain this trend we are seeing. So generally, there are more web pages. So at an underlying level, so I think that's an interesting phenomenon.

I think everybody as a creator, like you do at Verge, I think today if you're doing stuff, you have to do it in a cross-platform, cross-format way. You know, I look at the quality of video content you put out. It's very sophisticated, right? You know, and very different from how Verge used to be maybe five to 10 years ago, right? It's profoundly changed. So I think things are becoming more dynamic, cross-format. I think another thing people are underestimating with AI is...

AI will make it zero friction to move from one format to another, right? Because our models are natively multimodal. We kind of tease people's imagination with audio overviews in Notebook Ella, right? The fact you can throw a bunch of documents at it and you have a podcast and you can join and learn from it. So I think this notion, the static moment of like, you produce content by format, whereas I think machines can help

translated from, it's almost like different languages and they can go seamlessly between, I think is one of the incredible opportunities to be unlocked right ahead. And so maybe I didn't want to drift from the question we were having, but I think people are producing a lot of content and I see consumers consuming a lot of content.

and we see it in our products, others are seeing it too. So that's how I would probably answer the highest level. The way I see it currently is that the web is at an all-time high as an application platform.

Right. The fact that Figma exists and is as successful as it is in its primary interfaces as a web app is, I think, remarkable. A lot of the products you are talking about are expressed as web apps. Even some of the most interesting search results you showed yesterday are, you know, Google would generate a custom web app for you and display it in a search result to do some data visualization. Right.

I think that's all looking incredible. I think the web as a transaction platform is reaching new highs, especially with rulings that mean smartphone makers have to let people push transactions to the web. There's something very interesting happening there. As a media platform, it feels like it's at an all-time low.

You mean the web as a media platform? The web as a media platform, as an information platform. If I was starting The Verge today with 11 of my co-founder and friends, we would start a TikTok channel. We might start a YouTube channel. We would definitely not start a website with the dependencies we have as a website today. And that's the dynamic that it feels like AI is pushing on even harder.

I'm not fully sure I agree. I think if you were to go and restart Verge again, I bet you would have an extraordinary web presence. At best, no, I've thought about this a lot. I think at best our web presence would look like a substack or a ghost or something. Maybe. Look, I'm not fully sold on that, but you know the space. I acknowledge you know that space better than I do. I don't have that intuition which you do here.

But look, I see, in fact, you say the web application platform is an all time high, but I've looked, you know, I was vibe coding with Replit a few weeks ago. The power of what you're going to be able to create on the web, we haven't given that power to developers in 25 years. So that is going to come ahead.

So, you know, it's not exactly clear to me. You know, maybe today you're looking at it and say, I wouldn't put all the investment in because it looks like a lot of investment to do that. But that may not be true two years out.

If you feel like you would create a TikTok channel, maybe with like 2% extra effort, if you could have a robust web presence, why wouldn't you? Right. And so I'm not fully sold on it, but I think it's a good question to ask. But you have to somehow reconcile that with the fact that

Overall, that traffic seems to be growing. We see more web pages in our-- somewhere we have to explain all of that too. - You know, the publishers, as they often do, responded to Google I/O announcements. So the News Media Alliance, after AI Mode was announced yesterday,

I would say they're very upset. Here's a statement from the president of the News Media Alliance. Links were the last redeeming quality of search that gave publishers traffic and revenue. Now Google takes content by force and uses it with no return, no economic return. That's the definition of theft. And they go on to say the DOJ lawsuits must address it. That's pretty furious. That's not a negotiation, right? That's a, we just want this to stop. How do you respond to that very loud set of people who say, yeah, okay, maybe it's growing somewhere, but for us, it's crushing our businesses. Yeah.

First of all, through all the products, I mean, AI mode is going to have sources and, you know, we're very committed as a direction, as a product direction to make, I think part of why people come to Google is to experience that breadth of

of the web and go in the direction they want to. So I view this as giving more context. Yes, there are certain questions which may get answers, but overall, and that's the pattern we see today. And if anything, over the last year, it's clear to us the breadth of where we are sending people to is increasing.

And so I expect that to be true with AI mode as well. But if it was increasing, wouldn't they be less angry with you? You're always going to have areas where people are robustly debating value exchanges, et cetera, right? Like app developers and platforms that's not on the web, et cetera, right? It's inherently, you know, there's always going to be, when you're running a platform, these debates are...

I would challenge, I think more than any other company. We think about, we prioritize sending traffic to the web. No one sends traffic to the web in the way we do. I look at other companies, newer emerging companies, they openly talk about it as something they are not going to do. We are the only ones which make it a high priority, agonize.

And so on. Look, we'll engage and, you know, we've always engaged. There are going to be debates through it all, but we are committed to, you know, I've said this before, everything we do, you will see us five years from now sending a lot of traffic out to the web. I think that's the product direction we are committed to. I think it's what users look for when they come to Google and the nature of it will evolve.

But I am confident that that's the direction we will continue taking. Is there public data that shows that AI overviews and AI mode actually send more traffic out than the previous search engine results page? We're definitely sending traffic to a wider range of sources, publishers. Because just like we've done over 25 years, we've been through the same with featured snippets. It's higher quality referral traffic too. We can observe it because

the time when people spend as one metric and there are other ways by which we measure quality of our outbound traffic is also increasing. So, and overall through this transition, I think generally AI OVVs are also growing and the growth compounds over time. So whenever we work through these transitions, it ends up

posted. That's how Google has worked for 25 years. And we end up sending more traffic over time. So that's how I would expect all this to play out. So why do you think that there is so much general economic turmoil on that side of the house, right? If you're sending more traffic and the goal over time is to make sure that that works out, we're a year into it, right? And it doesn't seem to have gotten better over there. No, look, we are sending traffic to a broader source of people. People may be

You know, surfacing more content, looking at more content. So somebody individually may see less. I mean, there are all kinds of, at the end of the day, we are reflecting what users want, right? You know, if you do the wrong thing, users won't use our product, go somewhere else, right? And so you have all these dynamics underway. And I think we have genuinely, you know, we took a long time designing AI overviews and we are constantly iterating in a way that we prioritize this

you know, sources and sending traffic to the web. I mean, my criticism of this industry, just to be clear, is that everyone's addicted to Google and it would be better if they weren't. But they're addicted to Google, right? And they're feeling it. And then on top of that, you see, you've mentioned several times, like overall queries are increasing on Google surfaces, but they're changing, right? They're getting longer, they're getting more complicated. AI mode might walk you through several steps.

Maybe some people are searching on TikTok now. Eddie Q on the stand in the trial the other day said, "Search in Safari for the last month dropped for the first time in 22 years." That's a big stat. Obviously, your stock price was affected by it. There was a statement. Is that trend bearing out that the standard Google search is dropping from devices and different kinds of searches are increasing? No, look, we've been very clear. We are seeing overall query growth in search. It looks-- But have you actually seen the drop in Safari?

We have a comprehensive view of how we look at data across the board. There's a lot of, there can be a lot of noise in search data, but everything we see tells us we are seeing query growth, including across Apple's devices and platforms. And specifically, you know, I think we quantified the query growth from AI overviews. And what's healthy is that the query growth

is continuing to grow over time. This is what I've said before. It feels very far from a zero sum game to me. I said this last year. It's interesting we spoke about TikTok, right? Think about like how profound a new product TikTok was. How has YouTube done since TikTok has come, right? You could ask all these questions there. Like why is it that TikTok comes and YouTube has grown?

Right. Like, you know, and so I think what we always underestimate in these moments is people are engaging more, doing more with it. We are improving our products. So that's how I would I would think about these moments. We have to take another quick break. We'll be back in just a minute.

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Welcome back. I'm talking with Google CEO Sundar Pichai about what I think is one of the big questions about the AI everything era.

What incentives do websites and other apps and services have to play along? What pressures will agents put on the web we have today? And what kind of web will emerge from it? Let me just broaden that out to agents, right? I watched Demis Hassabis yesterday. He was on stage with Sergey Brin. And Alex Kantoritz asked him, what does a web look like in 10 years? And Demis said, I don't know that an agent-first web looks anything like the web that we have today. I don't know that we have to render web pages for agents the way that we have to see them.

That kind of implies that the web will turn into a series of databases for various agents to go and ask questions to and then return those answers. And I have been thinking about this in the context of services like Uber and DoorDash and Airbnb. Why would they want to participate in that and be abstracted away for agents to use the services they've spent a lot of time and money building? Two things, though. First, there's a lot done. In fact, it's a fascinating topic. Yeah.

the web is a series of databases, et cetera. We build a UI on top of it for all of us to consume. This is exactly what I wanted, is the web is a series of databases. It is. But I listened to the Demis Sergei conversation yesterday. I enjoyed it. I think he's saying for an agent-first web, for a web which is interacting with agents, you would think about how to make that process more efficient. Today, you're running a restaurant, people are coming, dining, and eating, and people are ordering takeout and delivery.

Obviously for you to service the takeout, you would think about it different than all the tables and the clothing and the furniture and the, like, you know, so, but both are important to you. You could be a restaurant which decides I'm not going to participate in the takeout business. I'm only going to focus on the dining experience. You're going to have some people vice versa. I'm going to say, I'm going to go all in on this and run a different experience.

To your question on agents, right? I think of agents as a new powerful format. I do think it'll happen in enterprises faster than consumer because in the context of an enterprise, you have a CIO who's able to go and say, I really don't know why these two things don't talk to each other. Yeah. I'm not going to buy more of this unless you interoperate with this.

I think partly why you see on the enterprise side a lot more agentic experiences. On the consumer side, I think what you're saying is a good point, right? People have to think about and say, what is the value for me to participate in this world? And it could come in many ways. It could be because I participate in it and overall my business grows, right? Some people may feel that it's disintermediating, right? And like, it doesn't make sense. All of that can happen.

But users may vote with their feet, right? Like, you know, you may find some people are supporting the agent experience and your life is better because of it. And so you're going to have all these dynamics and like, you know, and I think they're going to try and find an equilibrium somewhere. That's how everything evolves. Yeah.

I mean, I think the idea that the web is a series of databases and we change the interface. First of all, this is like the most decoder conversation that we've ever had. I'm very happy with it. But, you know, I had Dara from Uber on the show. I asked him this question from his perspective. And his answer tracks yours broadly. He said, first, we'll do it because it's cool. And we'll see if there's value there. And if there is, you know, he's going to charge a big fee for the agent to come and use Uber because losing the customer for him is

losing the ability to upsell or sell a subscription. None of that is great, right? It's the same is true for Airbnb. I keep calling it the DoorDash problem. Like DoorDash should not be a dumb pipe for sandwiches, right? They're trying to actually run a business and they want the customer relationship. And so if the agents are going across the web and they're looking at all these databases and saying, okay, this is where I get food from and this is where I get cars from and this is where I book. I think the demo was booking a vacation home in Spanish, right? And I'm going to connect you to that agent.

that travel agent. Is it just going to be tolls that everyone pays to let the agents work? Because the price, I still don't, the CIO gets to just spend money to solve the problem. He says, I want this capability from you. I'm just going to pay you to do it. The market, the consumer market doesn't have that capability, right? All kinds of models may emerge, right? I can literally see 20 different ways this could work. Consumers could pay a subscription for agents and the agents could rev share back.

All right, so that is a CIO-like use case you're talking about. That's possible. We can't rule that out. I don't think we should underestimate. People may actually see more value participating in it. It's tough to predict. But I do think over time, if you're removing friction and improving user experience, it's tough to bet against those in the long run. And so I think if in general you're lowering friction for it and people are enjoying using it,

somebody is going to want to participate in it and grow their business. - Yeah. - Right. And like, would brands want to be in retailers? Why don't they sell directly today? - Yeah. - Why won't they do that? - I don't know why- - But because retailers provide value in the middle, why do merchants take credit cards? Right? Like why pay, I'm just saying, so.

Like there are many parts like, and you find equilibrium because merchants take credit cards because they see more business as part of taking credit cards than not, right? And it justifies the increased cost of taking credit cards.

It may not be the perfect analogy, but I think there are all these kinds of effects going around. But what you're saying is true. Some of this will slow progress in agents just because we all are excited about A2A and MCP. And we think, no, like some of it will slow progress. But I think it'll be very dynamic. There's other pressures on Google. There's antitrust pressures. The government would like you to sell Chrome. Can you do all the things you want to do if you're made to sell Chrome?

We are in a legal process. I look at having directly been involved in building Chrome. I think there are very few companies which would have approved. We not only improved our product, we improved like

the state of the web by building Chrome. We open sourced it. We provided as Chromium. Everyone else has access to the browser. So I think the amount of R&D, the amount of innovation we've put into it, the investments in security, et cetera, we do. So I think we- But if you're made to sell it, can you do all the things that you want to do? I don't think that's the scenario we are looking at, but stepping back as a company,

Look, I think as a company, I think of ourselves as a deeply foundational technology company, which then translates it into products that touch billions of people. And, you know, so we do it across many, many things. And so, of course, I think, look, as a company, we are going to continue investing and doing our best to innovate and build a successful business in all scenarios.

So that's how I would answer it. The Trump administration is extremely transactional, I would say. You know, the tech industry has a new relationship with Trump in a second term. You were at the inauguration. Have you had conversations about what a settlement might look like and what the Trump administration might demand to make these problems go away?

No, like, obviously, we've engaged with the DOJ, like we do over the years in the context of all the cases we have. So that's, you know, that's how we normally do these conversations. Trump has very publicly said he doesn't like his search ranking and he wants it changed in some way. Would you ever adjust the search ranking for Donald Trump? No, like, you know, we have, I mean, I can't, today the way Google search works is I cannot change.

no person in Google can influence the ranking algorithm individually. AI mode is different, right? We've seen system prompts adjusted in very chaotic ways from some of your competitors. Is that something that you would be open to in a world where you're serving the full answer? Would you adjust the AI mode responses in response to political pressure?

Because we've seen, certainly in Grok and others, the system prompts change the answers in dramatic ways. The way we do ranking is sacrosanct to us. We've done it over 25 years. We make a lot of ranking signals. We take into account and stuff. And if there's broad feedback from people that something isn't working, we will look at it systematically and try and make changes. But

We don't look at individual cases and ever change ranking. When you think about those sources of information, one of the things that I've been thinking about a lot is, I don't know, the CDC web pages have changed a lot recently. Diversity, equity, inclusion language has been removed from pages across the government. Those used to be very high-ranking sources in Google search. We just implicitly trusted the CDC's web pages in some ways.

Are you reevaluating that? There might be misinformation on some of these pages that then gets synthesized into AI results? It's a misunderstanding of how search works. We don't individually evaluate that authoritativeness of a page. It's what our signals does. In a page rank, obviously our signals are

multiple orders of magnitude more complicated than PageRank today. But to use PageRank as an example, we weren't the ones determining how authoritative a page is. It's how other pages were linking to it, like an academic citation, et cetera. So we are not making those decisions today. And so I don't see that changing. As you synthesize more of the answers, do you think you're going to have to take more responsibility for the results?

Look, we are giving context around it, but we are still anchoring it in the sources we find. But we've always felt a high bar in Google. Last year, when we launched AI Overviews, I think people were adversarially querying to find errors, and the error rate was one in seven million for adversarial queries. But that's the bar we've always operated as a company. And so I think to me, nothing is...

Nothing has changed. Like, you know, Google operates under a very high bar. That's the bar we strive to meet. And, you know, our search page results are there for everyone to see. With that comes that natural accountability. And, you know, we have to constantly earn people's trust. So that's how I would approach it. What do you think the marker is for the next phase of the platform shift after this one? We opened by talking about we're in a second phase. What's the marker for the final phase or the third phase? Of the platform shift, you mean? Yeah. Of the AI platform? What are you looking for as the next marker?

The real thing about AI, which I think why I've always called it more profound is, you know, self-improving technology, right? And, you know, having watched AlphaGo, you know, start from scratch, not knowing how to play Go and, you know, within a couple hours or four hours be better than top-level human players. And in eight hours, you know, no human can ever ask for it to play against it, right? So...

And that's the essence of the technology, obviously, in a deep way. So I think, look, I think there's so much ahead on the opportunity side. You know, I'm blown away by the ability to discover new drugs, you know, completely change how we treat diseases like cancer over time, et cetera. You know, the opportunity is there. The creative power, which I talked about, which we're putting in everyone's hands, you

Like the next generation of kids, everyone can program and build to it. If you think of something, you can create it.

I don't think we have comprehended what that means, but that's going to be true. The part which the next phase of the shift, which is going to be really meaningful is when this translates into the physical world through robotics. So that aha moment of robotics, I think when it happens, that's going to be the next big thing we will all grapple with. Today, they're all online and you're doing things with it. But one hand, today,

I think of Waymo as a robot, right? So we are running around, driving around a robot, but I'm talking more general purpose robot. And, you know, and when AI creates that magical moment with robotics, I think that'll be a big platform shift as well. I'm looking forward to it. Next year, we're going to do this with glasses and robots. It's going to be great. We'll give it a shot. Thank you so much, Sundar. All right. Thanks, Nila. I appreciate it.

I'd like to thank Sundar Pichai for taking the time to speak with me on Decoder. And thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. As always, if you'd like to let us know what you thought about this episode or really anything else, drop us a line. You can email us at decoderattheverge.com. We really do read all the emails. You can also meet us directly on Threads or Blue Sky. And we have a TikTok and an Instagram. They're both at DecoderPod. A lot of fun.

If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you really like the show, hit us with that five-star review. Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Ursa Wright. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time. Support for this show comes from Sophos.

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