Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview

**David Friedberg** (0:04)
We're sitting here at the Google Plex with the CEO of Alphabet, Sundar. Thanks for being here.

**Sundar Pichai** (0:09)
Great to have you here, David. Look forward to it.

**David Friedberg** (0:11)
Is Google at risk of being truly disrupted from AI?

**Sundar Pichai** (0:14)
Recently, we're testing it in labs. This whole new dedicated AI experience called AI mode coming to search.

**David Friedberg** (0:20)
OpenAI has Sam, XAI has Elon, Meta has Zuck, Microsoft has Sacha. Are you willing to share your perspectives on those four competitors?

**Sundar Pichai** (0:30)
I think maybe only one of them has invited me to a dance, not the others.

**David Friedberg** (0:33)
Biggest regret?

**Sundar Pichai** (0:35)
Look, there are acquisitions. We debated hard, came close.

**David Friedberg** (0:39)
Just give me one name.

**Sundar Pichai** (0:41)
We're going to get in trouble. Maybe Netflix. We just leaned into the user experience, and over time, we figured out monetization to follow.

**David Friedberg** (0:49)
It's like one of the original principles of Google, follow the user, all else will follow.

**Sundar Pichai** (0:54)
Yeah, there you go.

**David Friedberg** (1:06)
We are giving people ground truth data to underwrite your own opinion. What did you guys think? That was fun. I'm really excited for this conversation. You and I started working at Google on the same day in 2004

**Sundar Pichai** (1:20)
I didn't quite realize that. We were both in the same time.

**David Friedberg** (1:23)
Same Noogler class. We had the hats on that same week on the Friday, all hands. I'm now a podcaster. You've done a little bit differently.

**Sundar Pichai** (1:31)
You're more than a podcaster, but you're very good at podcasting too.

**David Friedberg** (1:35)
Well, I appreciate it.

**Sundar Pichai** (1:36)
I think I respect the other stuff you've done as well.

**David Friedberg** (1:39)
I appreciate it. But in your tenure at Google, you ran Chrome, Chrome OS Drive, Google Maps, and it's been 10 years now since you've been the CEO here at Google Now Alphabet. Amazing, and congratulations. Under your tenure as CEO, the stock has gone up by 4.5x to a $2 trillion market cap today. You've grown revenue from 20 billion a quarter to nearly 100 billion a quarter. It's been a really incredible run to see someone that started as a PM and grew your way into this incredible role. So congrats. How have you liked the job?

**Sundar Pichai** (2:16)
Look, I mean, I love building products. And in some ways, Google was really set up, I think the founders set up this kind of a deep computer science approach. And you take that and apply it to build things which can impact people on a day-to-day basis. And so it's that kind of a product and technical culture, which is the essence of the company. So I love doing that and there's not a single week which goes by, but I feel like I don't get to do that. So those are the parts I really enjoy. But obviously, running a company of this scale where you impact so many people, I think it's a privilege. So enjoyed every part of it.

**David Friedberg** (2:58)
You're at a pivotal moment in the company's history today. Have you read The Innovator's Dilemma?

**Sundar Pichai** (3:05)
I'm obviously very, very familiar with the concept. I don't think I've read the book, actually, but it's one of those things which is so much in the ether, you think you know it.

**David Friedberg** (3:13)
Right. I say it in jest because that's the talk of the town, the talk on Wall Street, the talk in Silicon Valley. Is Google getting disrupted in this moment? AI seems to create a fundamentally different paradigm for human-computer interaction. Consumers are asking AI questions through chat interfaces. They're getting complete answers. They're engaging with AI systems in a way that they traditionally didn't do with the classical search interface. Is Google at risk of being truly disrupted from AI? Is the core search business, which the ad revenue on search is about a $200 billion run rate out of $360 billion of your total revenue, most of your profits? And it seems like Google is in a really challenging quandary where if you disrupt yourselves too quickly, all of that revenue can go away. It can be really impactful. So is Google being disrupted by AI at this moment or is Google leading?

**Sundar Pichai** (4:05)
It's a good framework, good question to talk about. I've definitely, for almost a decade, one of the first things I did was to think of the company as AI first. It was very clear to us. We had Google Brain underway in 2012 We acquired DeepMind in 2014 2015, when I became the CEO, I said, look, the technology is really evolving. The reason we were excited to approach our work as AI first is because we really felt that AI is what will drive the biggest progress in search.