Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s AI talk at a university commencement speech this weekend drew a chorus of boos. But if the students’ reaction was a sign of anxiety, or ambivalence, about the rapid onslaught of AI in our daily lives, the message clearly did not reach Google headquarters.
At the company’s annual developer conference in Mountain View, Calif. on Tuesday, AI was the overwhelming, and virtually sole focus, of the roughly two hours of keynote presentations delivered by executives. Google showcased a variety of new ways AI will be integrated even more deeply across its widely used family of products, from search and email to productivity software and smart glasses.
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google parent company Alphabet, kicked off the Google I/O event praising AI’s role in helping students prep for exams and allowing artists and musicians to get into their “creative flow” as the world moves into the “agentic AI era.”
In a very visible sign of how important AI has become to the $4.7 trillion company, Google said it was redesigning the iconic search box that sits at the center of its sparse, all-white homepage. The company is enlarging the dimensions of the search box to expand and better accommodate the natural language queries that users can now make with AI. Users will also now be able to enlist AI agents for complex, ongoing research projects via the search box, ordering up custom reports for anything from apartment hunting to financial news.
