👉 Background: Google runs its annual developer conference called I/O, where they release a few exciting updates to whet the appetites of investors, tech nerds, and early tech adopters.

👉 What happened: This year, Alphabet's CEO Sundar Pichai announced a major update to its AI platform:

• They will improve their Search algorithm with AI-generated answers into the search results
  
• The plan is for the AI summaries to sound more factual than conversational, unlike Chat GPT.
• For the investors, the new AI experiment will still feature ads (where Google makes the majority of its revenue).

👉 What else: Just to reinforce how serious they are about it, the word 'AI' was mentioned 276 times in the 2 hour presentation. That’s a run rate of 2.3 “AI’s” per minute! But despite the excitement, the AI will be introduced slowly and steadily.

What's the key learning?

💡If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Except that Google Search is broke... because new innovations in AI have meant that Google Search currently looks like a 20-year-old system.

💡But Google needs to strike a very careful balancing act: it needs to remain on the cutting edge while ensuring it's delivering reliable search results. The risk with AI is that it has the tendency to make up things... in a really authoritative way (aka hallucinations).

💡So while Google is making the big move to remain on the cutting edge, it's taking baby steps so it doesn't throw out its Search-baby with the bath water.