CEO Sundar Pichai reportedly told Google employees that 2025 will be a “critical” year for the company.
CNBC reports that it obtained audio from a December 18 strategy meeting where Pichai and other executives put on ugly holiday sweaters and laid out their priorities for the coming year.
“I think 2025 will be critical,” Pichai said. “I think it’s really important we internalize the urgency of this moment, and need to move faster as a company. The stakes are high.
The moment, of course, is one where tech companies like Google are making heavy investments in AI, and often with mixed results. Pichai acknowledged that the company has some catching up to do on the AI side — he described the Gemini app (based on the company’s AI model of the same name) as having strong momentum, while also acknowledging we have some work to do in 2025 to close the gap and establish a leadership position there as well.
Project Astra, Google’s experimental version of a universal assistant that the company announced in May, will be updated in the first half of the year.
Another employee question asked whether Google will be able to get AI products to scale without charging $200 a month “like other companies.”
“Right now, we don’t have any plans for this kind of subscription level,” Hassabis responded, adding that he thinks the $20 monthly charge for Gemini advanced is a good value. “I wouldn’t necessarily say never but there are no plans for that at the moment.”
Toward the end of the meeting, Google welcomed to the stage Josh Woodward, the head of Google Labs. He took the microphone as the Zombie Nation song “Kernkraft 400” played loudly in the background.
“I’m going to try to do six demos in eight minutes,” said Woodward, who’s known for his high level of energy.
Woodward started by showing off Jules, a coding assistant that’s in a trusted tester’s program. He said, “It’s where the future of software development is headed.”
Woodward then shifted to AI notetaking product NotebookLM, which featured a series of updates in 2024, including a podcasting tool. Woodward demonstrated how the company is trying a new feature that allows the user to “call in” to a podcast.
He then moved onto Project Mariner, an AI-powered multi-tasking Chrome extension. Woodward asked it to add the top restaurants from Tripadvisor
to the Maps app. After a brief pause, the demo successfully worked, leading employees in attendance to erupt in applause.
Throughout the meeting, Pichai kept reminding employees of the need to “stay scrappy.” Google has gone through an extensive phase of cost cutting that included eliminating about 6% of its workforce in 2023 and a continued focus on efficiency.
As of the end of the third quarter, Alphabet had 181,269 employees, down about 5% from the end of 2022.
At one point, Pichai referenced Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who started the company 26 years ago, long before cloud computing or AI tools existed.
“In early Google days, you look at how the founders built our data centers, they were really really scrappy in every decision they made,” Pichai said. “Often, constraints lead to creativity. Not all problems are always solved by headcount.”
“Scaling Gemini on the consumer side will be our biggest focus next year,” he said.
