Google just announced major AI advancements with big implications for business leaders—including an AI-first overhaul of search.
The updates were announced at Google’s I/O developer conference. Some of the most important updates include:
- A new next-gen large language model called PaLM 2. Google says it “excels at advanced reasoning tasks, including code and math, classification and question answering, translation and multilingual proficiency better than our previous state-of-the-art LLMs.”
- AI features added to search. Google is releasing a “Search Generative Experience,” which will deliver conversational search results.
- New AI writing tools for Gmail.
- The removal of the waitlist for Bard.
- The ability to create documents, generate slides, and fill in spreadsheets with AI in Google Workspace apps like Docs, Slides, and Sheets.
What do these announcements mean for business leaders?
In Episode 47 of the Marketing AI Show, I spoke to Marketing AI Institute founder and CEO Paul Roetzer to find out.
Here’s what you need to know…
- Google is back. The company has been criticized for being slow to react to AI challenges from Microsoft, OpenAI, and others. These updates remind us that Google never really left, says Roetzer. “There probably isn’t a more advanced organization in the world from the perspective of AI than Google.”
- But something has changed. Historically, Google hasn’t had the motivation to make big moves that could disrupt its lucrative search ads business. That seems to be changing. “There seems to be a willingness on Google’s part to do things they weren’t willing to do before,” says Roetzer.
- And now they’re uniquely positioned to win. They have thousands of AI and machine learning employees. They have 20+ years of AI research experience. They have data centers and compute that almost no one else has. They have their own custom-designed chips for AI (TPUs). And they’re sitting on $115 billion in cash (according to their most recent earnings call), as well as 6 million Google Workspace business customers. “I’d be a little worried if I was the completion,” says Roetzer.
- Expect search to get disrupted. Regardless of who wins the AI arms race, search gets massively disrupted either way. If we increasingly get answers to queries through generative AI, content publishing sites see less traffic, says Roetzer. “It sure seems like it’s going to be a massive disruption to SEO and content publishing for brands.”
- And expect the workplace to change—fast. Once AI gets completely infused into Google Workspace, it’s going to be really interesting, says Roetzer. “I think turning this stuff loose on the world when knowledge workers have no real training for it, and everybody in the organization all of a sudden has these tools, it’s going to be game-changing and we’re not ready for it,” says Roetzer.
The bottom line: Google’s AI announcements make it a leading competitor in the AI arms race—and are going to change search and work as we know it.
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