Google Search Chief Urges Employees to ‘Act Faster’ Because ‘Everything Has Changed’

Google’s search chief Prabhakar Raghavan, who oversees search, advertising, maps and commerce and reports directly to CEO Sundar Pichai, addressed Google’s knowledge and information division, which has more than 25,000 full-time employees. According to him, Google’s digital advertising business has become “the envy of the whole world”But “This does not mean that life will remain cloudless forever.”

“I think we can agree that things are not the same as they were 15-20 years ago, things have changed.”“Raghavan said, referring to the search industry that Google dominated for two decades, becoming one of the most profitable and valuable companies on the planet. Over the past three years, annual revenue has grown by more than $100 billion.

At a company known in Silicon Valley for its gourmet free lunches and generous benefits, Raghavan’s report could be considered the latest warning to employees that Google’s growth is becoming increasingly difficult. He cited increased competition and a more complex regulatory environment. Raghavan spoke about the need to speed up projects under development and reduce time standards for generating reports. He also said that the company plans to get closer to users in key markets, including India and Brazil.

Google is facing serious pressure from companies like Microsoft and OpenAI in the field of generative artificial intelligence. “People come to us because they trust, said Raghavan. — They might have a new gizmo that they like to play with, but they still come to Google to check out what they see there because it is a trusted source and becomes more important in the age of generative AI.”

Google has been in cost-cutting mode since early 2023, when it cut about 12,000 jobs, accounting for 6% of the company’s workforce. Layoffs have continued this year, and the company is currently restructuring its financial services, which will entail additional staff reductions.

Raghavan noted that over the past three months, many events have occurred in the company, including “really high highs and low lows”. Google unveiled its AI-powered image generator, but was forced to shut it down after a short period of time due to a host of glitches that went viral on the internet. Google is reorganizing amid an AI boom that is causing more users to abandon traditional internet searches.

Although Alphabet reported better-than-expected revenue and profit for the fourth quarter, advertising revenue lagged analysts’ forecasts, sending the company’s shares down more than 6%. Despite the positive first-quarter results, year-on-year revenue growth is expected to be subdued. Analysts say Google’s growth performance is one of the weakest in history. According to Raghavan, the frenzy of interest in AI is forcing the company to spend much more on hardware. “Growth in this new operating reality must be earned through hard work.”he added.

Image source: Pixabay

Additional challenges for the company stem from changes in the regulatory environment. Raghavan noted that the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), which came into force last month, “really has an impact on us”. He called on the staff “see this moment and act urgently, based on market conditions”.

Raghavan believes Google needs to solve its systemic problems and increase “new muscles that we may have allowed to weaken for a while.” He noted employees working on the large Gemini language model increased their work hours from 100 to 120 per week to fix the image generation tool in a timely manner. This helped the team fix about 80% of the problems in just 10 days, he said. However, the ability to generate images of people is still not available.

According to Raghavan, the company has demonstrated the ability to quickly resolve important issues. As an example, he cited efforts in 2023, where the Bard (now Gemini) team and the AI ​​search team at Magi launched products within a few months.

Image Source: Getty Images

Many Google employees complain about the company’s rampant bureaucracy, which prevents them from launching products quickly. The situation became noticeably worse when the company dramatically increased its workforce during the pandemic. In 2022, in addition to Google’s annual survey called Googlegeist, Sundar Pichai launched the Simplicity Sprint to gather employee feedback on performance.

Raghavan said that active work is underway to eliminate unnecessary layers in the hierarchy. “[Огромное] the number of agreements and approvals required to bring a good idea to market is not the Google way. We shouldn’t act like this, said Raghavan. — We’ve learned a lot over the past few quarters. I can’t tell you that all the failures are behind me. It’s how we react and what we learn that matters.”