At a strategy meeting inviting Alphabet Inc. googlegoogle CEO Sundar Pichai touched on key topics for 2025, including artificial intelligence, competition, and regulatory pressures.
“The stakes are high,” Pichai said at a December 18 rally, CNBC reported. “I think 2025 is going to be very important. I think it’s very important that we recognize the urgency of this moment, and we need to move faster as a company.”
Mr. Pichai and other Alphabet leaders convened wearing ugly Christmas sweaters. Employees attended in person and watched virtually. CNBC obtained audio of the meeting.
Pichai said the company needs to focus on solving user problems and unlocking the benefits of AI for users. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company plans to release some AI capabilities in the first half of 2025, he said.
The comments come as the Justice Department presses Alphabet to sell Google Chrome to end its alleged search monopoly.
“It’s not wrong to me that we face scrutiny around the world. That comes with our size and success. Technology is now impacting society on a massive scale,” Pichai said. It’s part of a broader trend that’s giving us a lot of attention. So now more than ever, through this incident, we have to stay undistracted.”
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Alphabet’s search dominance with the Google brand also faces pressure from generative AI and new competition. Google’s Gemini app, which uses AI to deliver search results, could be one of the company’s biggest focuses in 2025.
Pichai said “building new businesses at scale” is one of his top priorities for 2025, and this includes the Gemini app.
“We’ve seen strong momentum around the Gemini app, especially in recent months,” Pichai said. “But we have some work to do to close that gap by 2025 and establish a leadership position there as well.”
Pichai compared Gemini to competitors such as OpenAI and acknowledged that the company is playing catch-up on some aspects of AI.
“You don’t always have to be first in history, but you have to execute well and be really best-in-class as a product. I think that’s what 2025 is all about.”
Pichai also called for more scraps from the company’s more than 180,000 employees.
“If you look at how Google’s founders built our data centers in the early days of Google, they were really, really careful in every decision they made. Connect. Not all problems are always solved by people.”
Price Action: Alphabet stock fell 1% to $192.15 on Monday, compared to a 52-week trading range of $131.55 to $202.88. Alphabet stock has increased 37.6% since the beginning of the year in 2024.
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