At Google, AI is reshaping employees’ titles and how they work. Last month, Google Cloud’s senior director and chief evangelist Richard Seroter told Fast Company that software engineers have turned into product engineers, or architects, as they move away from manual coding to directing teams of AI agents. It seems that AI has changed how Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, works too.
“I just think the CEO job is not that complicated,” Pichai said when asked how close AI is to replacing him as a CEO during a recent interview with The Verge. “There are aspects of it where I think [AI] is going to be very, very helpful in terms of decision-making.”
The CEO added that AI can “make more rational choices over time.” He also said that “there are very, very few decisions which are really consequential, and most decisions aren’t.” Instead, Pichai said, making decisions and keeping the company moving forward is most important.
“Done correctly, these tools are going to allow us to operate at the next level in everything we are doing,” Pichai added. “It’s not like you won’t do what you were doing before. You will start from a higher foundation.”
Pichai likened AI agents to the advent of other innovations in the workplace, like spreadsheets. “I have to think back to, ‘how did people do all this financial analysis before?’” he asked. “I’m sure it changed over a period of three to four years fundamentally, and we got used to it.”
With AI, some companies are restructuring their organizations completely.
Block CEO Jack Dorsey said he wants 6,000 direct reports, effectively eliminating middle managers. Meta announced plans to create an AI engineering team with 50 engineers that reported to a single manager. Pichai didn’t confirm or deny that similar extreme restructuring would take place at Google.
“Leaders and people are incredibly important,” Pichai said. “And it depends. Some companies have a much narrower suite of products, and so different structures may work. When you’re running something at the scale of Google Cloud, it’s important that there is a CEO in charge.”
Still, as Google uses AI “more effectively,” roles at the company have changed. Pichai said that developers at Google went from merely using AI tools to assisting AI agents with coding, while some engineers direct teams of AI agents. Last month, the CEO announced that 75% of the company’s code was AI-generated.
During the interview, Pichai also chimed in on the current trend of commencement speakers being booed for drumming up AI. Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, was booed at the University of Arizona during his commencement address when he spoke about the rise of AI.
“AI is the most profound technology humanity’s going to deal with,” Pichai said in the interview. “It’s happening at a very fast pace. I don’t think humans have evolved to process this much change, and the rate of change particularly over the last few years is incredibly high.”
While Pichai acknowledged people’s concerns about how AI is changing the job market and the economy, he added that AGI—or artificial general intelligence, a hypothetical AI that matches or exceeds human cognitive capabilities—is on the horizon, “coming sooner rather than later,” and that it is “important that we as a society understand it and are preparing as much as possible.”
If that’s any indication of how Pichai will talk about AI during his commencement address at Stanford University in June, we’ll have to wait and see how his words go over with those grads.