Google CEO Sundar Pichai has a one-word message for those who think the internet giant has fallen behind in the A.I. arms race: mobile.
With its Android smartphone platform, and a massive mobile advertising business, Google famously transformed itself from a desktop-centered company into a dominant force in the mobile computing business a decade ago.
According to Pichai, the company is poised to repeat the feat—and perhaps even best it—with A.I.
“It’s a competitive moment, but I’ve built the company to be A.I. native for a long time,” Pichai said this week in an interview with Bloomberg. “I feel better positioned for this than we were for the shift to mobile.”
That confidence is sure to raise eyebrows among some industry observers who watched the company bungle a rushed launch of its A.I.-based Bard chatbot earlier this year and who have seen startup OpenAI (along with its partner and investor Microsoft) become the stars of the generative A.I. frenzy. And Google suffered another setback just this week when it was forced to delay launching Bard in Europe because of privacy concerns by regulators, according to Politico.
But Pichai is correct in pointing out that Google has been investing in A.I. for years. And it’s also true that Google has shown an impressive ability to adapt to shifting tech currents, as it did in spectacular fashion when the mobile wave threatened to sweep it aside.
After Apple released the iPhone in 2007, Google, along with the rest of the tech industry, scrambled to reposition itself in a new mobile and touch-screen-based world. One year later, Google released Android, a copycat smartphone operating system available free of charge to mobile-phone makers desperate for a way to compete with the iPhone. Within a few years, Android had become the number one smartphone OS in the world.
Of course, Pichai was not Google’s CEO in 2008. The company was then led by Eric Schmidt, with cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin backing him up in a sort of power trio formation. (Apple’s Steve Jobs was so infuriated by Android that he famously vowed to go “thermonuclear” on Google).
Pichai’s response to the A.I. threat, by contrast, seems unlikely to get anyone to scramble the jets—he told Bloomberg that Google is taking its time and moving cautiously as it incorporates A.I. into its products because of the technology’s power and its tendency to make mistakes.
“There are a few things we want to make sure we get right. People come to us and type queries like, ‘What’s the Tylenol dosage for my 3-year-old?’ There’s no room to get that wrong.”
Google Bard, the A.I.-enhanced search tool the company launched to compete with Microsoft’s A.I.-powered Bing search, is still an experimental project on a test website—it’s “very early time,” Pichai said in the interview, noting that Bing and Bard each have areas where one performs better than the other.
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Unlike the mobile battle that Google’s past leaders waged against Apple, Pichai is in some ways trying to win the A.I. contest with one hand tied behind his back. The situation was apparent during Google’s developer conference in May. As Fortune’s Jeremy Kahn wrote after the event, the dozens of new A.I. features and tools that Google announced were impressive but somewhat incremental: “A lot of it merely ensures Google keeps pace with what Microsoft and an increasing slew of other competitors are offering.”
The announcements and Pichai’s latest comments seem designed to signal that, far from going into a code-red panic over Microsoft’s A.I. advances, Google sees the competition as a chess match.
And Pichai certainly isn’t about to “dance,” as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a taunt during the company’s A.I. launch event in February.
“I think he said it so that you would ask me this question,” Pichai noted when asked about the comment by Bloomberg. “It’s all part of the game.”
