Sundar Pichai Reveals What AI Will Do Next

Sometimes I'm about to go meet on a CEO.

Sometimes while walking to the meeting, I'll ask Gemini, "Tell me what is something that could really be on his or her mind?" And I get really insightful

her mind?" And I get really insightful things, and which makes for a more human connection because that's actually what they are worried about. Google CEO

Sundar Pichai isn't nearly as well known as other tech CEOs, but Google is playing a massively important role in exposing everyday people to AI tools, and has the resources and talent to

eventually win the AI race. On April

8th, I went to Google headquarters to talk to Pichai about how AI is reshaping decision-making, the rise of AI assistants, and what it will take to build this technology responsibly. You

can read the rest of my interview with Pichai in Time magazine.

Look, in some ways we've had a mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.

I view AI as the most profound way we can make progress against that mission.

Uh it's going to be such a powerful enabler pretty much across all walks of your life.

And so, we want to make sure we translate that into concrete, tangible benefits for billions of people.

Internally, I'm able to use our tools and you know, query Gemini to get extraordinarily important information I need to make decisions. In the past, I would suddenly you know, I would

probably wait for a couple days for to get the decision.

Now it's a command away. It's a prompt away. Right? And

away. Right? And

uh I I've I've enjoyed uh coding. Uh I've enjoyed building

uh coding. Uh I've enjoyed building things. So, I think it's really making

things. So, I think it's really making me more productive in ways I couldn't have imagined before.

I think it's really going to help with decision-making by bringing the right information, as well as being a an assistant to you as you're making these decisions. Since

the beginning of 2026, AI agents like Open Claw have gained huge adoption with people outsourcing many parts of their lives to machines. I asked Pichai about how agents fit into Google's future.

People are trying to schedule calendar, plan dinners, uh throw parties, make it to their kids' appointments. You know, your life has a

appointments. You know, your life has a lot of tasks, uh and so literally, where can we do more of that work

and and and make your life 10, 20, 30, 40% better, easier, so that you can use the time for things that matter to you. Right? And and that's that's why I think the personal notion

of personalized agents helping you across many, many things.

Can it automatically look at my inbox and tell, "Here are the three emails I need to respond to?" And here are suggested responses, which I can edit maybe. And you know, so those are simple

maybe. And you know, so those are simple examples to more complex workflows.

Right? Always monitor what's happening in the world regarding this topic, summarize it and bring it to me in a digestible way. You know, these are all

digestible way. You know, these are all examples and there are infinite possibilities. People working on what

possibilities. People working on what we've been calling agentic AI for the past couple of years.

Uh you know, internally, a lot of us are using these powerful agents.

I think Open Claw kind of brought it to the hands of many people in a tangible way where people could kind of understand the change that's about to come.

So, I think it was very important for that moment to happen.

But I do think the era of personalized agents, very capable agents which are helping you with many, many things, uh that will play out for everyone. And so,

that's the exciting phase ahead. In

general, in terms of how they are adopting the tools, we generally find that people are engaging uh pretty actively.

Last year we launched this thing called Nana Banana, which allowed people to create images with prompts.

We literally had, you know, over a billion images created just in a matter of days.

People around the world engaging with, expressing their creativity.

So, I see people engaging with the technology, regardless of I think people have rightfully a sense of optimism, sense of anxiety about the whole technology space as a whole.

But in terms of their day-to-day usage, I think they're engaging. If they get the chance, they they they're engaging pretty heavily with these tools. AI has

an extremely low approval rating in America right now. I asked Pichai to respond to criticism that Google is building tools people don't want. I

think there are there are a set of larger policy ideas.

You know, I view our role as engaging with policy makers and regulators to help them think through the areas which I think are much more important in the near term, where we are

engaged very closely, is how do we responsibly grow and meet our energy needs in a sustainable way?

Things like permitting reform, investing in new types of energy. How do

you manage the cybersecurity risks that are emerging?

How do you invest in education and reskilling the workforce?

I think those how do you handle deepfakes?

How do we make sure we can all understand what reality is?

To us, those have felt like the more immediate efforts, and we haven't by any means addressed all of those areas. So,

I think we have focused more as a company on engaging as well as contributing in those areas. So, what

would you say to some people who are scared of the idea of big tech controlling potentially the most powerful technology

ever created? Look, I think there are

ever created? Look, I think there are many, many uh companies pursuing this.

Even just through this AI moment, there there are new companies which are what you would probably call big tech, which didn't exist 3 years ago.

I've never seen a space be more dynamic.

Uh there are a variety of players, big and small, working on this technology.

There is open source. We just released Gemma 4, which is a powerful open source model. It's fully open source, available

model. It's fully open source, available for anyone to use.

I do think over time, governments will be involved given the power of this technology.

This is the kind of technology which which is it's not it's unlike anything before.

There is no way one company or a few companies are going to do it detached from the rest of society. So, I think you know, we'll all have to build it and usher this next phase in a responsible

way.

Like many of his peers paving the way in AI, Pichai told me he expects this new technology will need unprecedented frameworks, [music] governance, and guardrails.

But he trusts that humanity will rise to the moment.