Google's sales staff has been restructured, including in Australia, with significant job cuts. The scale is huge: Alphabet plans to spend $700 million in layoff payments in the next quarter alone. But that leaves more money for AI in the long run.
What makes it tick: The idea that chatbots will undermine Google's search, and therefore advertising, dominance has so far proven alarming. But that doesn't mean there aren't risks if Google rests on its laurels. And at great cost, we are making more AI tools available to more parts of our business.
More ads are automatically generated, more viewers are automatically targeted, and your content is shown across Google platforms. Google is also working on improving its chatbot. cost? Alphabet spent $US11 billion ($16.7 billion) on capital expenditures, up from $7 billion in the same period a year earlier, with most of it going to data centers and servers needed to run its AI tools.
Our view: “We're not restructuring to let AI take over, and that's the important thing here,” Google Chief Business Officer Philipp Schindler said on an earnings call Wednesday. That may be true in the sense that machines aren't exactly replicating what Google's advertising salespeople once did. But on the internet, it's clear that machines are doing more and less work selling Google's ads, and less for humans.
While this is unfortunate for salespeople, it makes sense for Google and other similarly positioned companies that are leading the industry but facing AI disruption. No one will go down the same path as many newspapers that didn't take the Internet seriously 20 years ago.
breakdown is a regular column that unpacks and explains the big stories in the technology industry.
