Liz Reid on What Publishers Get Wrong About AI

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**Liz Reid** (1:00)
Sometimes they'll add a paywall and then they'll say, my traffic's down. And you're like, yes, yes, that is what will happen if you charge.

**Jason Howell** (1:19)
Hello, everybody, and welcome to AI Inside. This is a show where we take a look at the AI that is layered throughout the world of technology. I'm one of your hosts, Jason Howell. My cohost, Jeff Jarvis, is with me today. He'll be here for the interview. And boy, do we have a special interview for you today. I've been looking forward to this immensely. Our guest is Liz Reid, who's been at Google for 23 years. She was one of the first female engineers in Google's New York office, actually spent 17 years building Google Maps. And today, she runs Google Search. Billions of people using the product that she runs every single day. Pretty important person doing pretty important stuff behind the scenes at Google. Now, right now, that product, Search, is going through the biggest transformation that it's seen since the introduction of the search box. And actually, last month, I was in Mountain View for Google IO.,
they mentioned that AI mode hit a billion monthly users. People more and more apparently treating the search box like it's a conversational interaction. And Liz actually says in our interview that people are adapting to that faster than even she expected. And she shares a few key reasons as far as why she thinks that is. We also dive deep into the personalization of search, a lot of the personal intelligence features coming into search. And Liz actually makes the case that integrating your personal data into search, your emails, your maps, history, calendar, all that kind of stuff could actually be the thing that helps small publishers instead of hurting them. Publishers will want to hear that. She also has a pretty direct take on paywalls. And I'm guessing some publishers won't love to hear.
She flips the filter bubble argument upside down.
Jeff asked her about this, and she argues that not personalizing search actually creates more filter bubbles because people just go straight to the one source that they already know. And she's honest about how early all this stuff really is, how they at Google are still figuring out how to deliver the proper metrics that publishers are looking for. And I even asked her where she was when the word ignore broke AI overviews just a few weeks back. She walks us through what it's like when something big like that happens so suddenly. So we got a lot of ground to cover. Let's get into it. Here's our fantastic conversation with Liz Reid.
Welcome to AI Inside. Liz, it is so great to have you here. Liz Reid from Google, the search team and a name that everyone that watches the show is very familiar with. Thank you for being here with us today.

**Liz Reid** (3:59)
Thank you for having me.

**Jason Howell** (4:01)
Yeah, it's super cool to get to check in with folks at Google, and we're just really appreciative of your time, especially because this is such an important moment for not only just technology at large, but clearly artificial intelligence is such a huge moment that's happening in tech right now. But beyond that, you work so closely, as you do, with the search product, and we're going to talk a lot about that today, and how all of these technologies coming together is really, in some ways, reshaping, in many ways reshaping what Google has done with its primary product of search. But you being the person who really gets to make these changes to the search box, this thing that is so iconic and integral to what Google has done over the last few decades, what does it feel like to be in that position from the inside, having your fingers on kind of that kind of change? It's a big deal.