Google CEO sees company's next trillion in value from search, AI

San Francisco

in value from WHILE many other technology giants embrace the metaverse as the next frontier of growth, Sundar Pichai sees Google's future in its oldest offering: Internet search.

"I feel fortunate our mission is timeless," the chief executive officer (CEO) of Google and its parent, Alphabet Inc, said in an interview for the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in Singapore. "There's more need to organise information than ever before."

Earlier this month, Alphabet briefly crossed US$2 trillion in market value thanks to sales and profit growth during the pandemic. When asked where the next trillion would come from, Pichai pointed to his company's core service. Consumers will ask computers more questions with voice and "multi-modal experiences", he predicted. "Being able to adapt to all that and evolve search will continue to be the biggest opportunity."

Since taking over Google in 2015, Pichai has pushed the company deeper into cloud computing and artificial intelligence (AI), while facing an increase in regulatory scrutiny. In the interview, he ticked off Google's key growth businesses - cloud, the YouTube video service and its app store - and said AI investments were "underlying" each of them. The India-born executive also said he expects that more of Google's products will be developed and tested in Asia first, before spreading across the globe - not in China, though.

After icing plans to bring search to mainland China in 2018, following an employee uproar, Google has kept most of its services out of the most populous nation. "I don't see that changing," Pichai said.

But he does not share other Silicon Valley executives' dim view of China's tech advances. He said Google is "neck to neck" with Chinese companies in AI and quantum computing, but argued that the US and China have room to collaborate in areas such as climate change and AI safety.

Some of Google's largest peers, such as Microsoft and Facebook parent Meta Platforms, have pitched their futures around the virtual worlds of the metaverse. Google has taken several approaches at virtual- and augmented-reality products, with limited success. Years ago, its first attempt, the Google Glass, famously flopped.

Google recently placed these efforts in a new division, although Pichai did not provide specifics about the strategy. "I've always been excited about the future of immersive computing," he said. "This doesn't belong to any company. This is the evolution of the Internet." BLOOMBERG