Google executives say employees need to be more familiar with AI

Google Executives are urging employees to act more urgently in using artificial intelligence as the company is looking for ways to reduce costs.

This was a message from last week's All Hands Meeting. CEOs Sundar Pichai and Brian Saluzzo run a team that builds the technology foundation for Google's flagship products.

“Whenever you go through an extraordinary period of investment, you'll respond by adding more people, right?” According to audio obtained by CNBC, Pichai said. “But I think we have to achieve more in this AI moment by leveraging this transition and increasing productivity.”

In its revenue report last week, Alphabet said it plans to spend $85 billion on capital expenditures in 2025, up from the $75 billion it targeted at the beginning of the year. This is a theme that resonates with the whole technology that the internet giants are racing to build costly data centers to reduce costs elsewhere, while running large AI models and workloads.

“We are competing with other companies around the world,” Pichai told the meeting. “There are companies that are more efficient throughout this moment in terms of employee productivity, so I think it's important to focus on that.”

June, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said the company's corporate workforce will shrink over the next few years as it employs more generative AI tools and agents. In an email to employees, Jassy wrote that employees need to learn how to experiment with AI tools and understand “how to achieve more with the Scrappie team.”

Microsoft“Using AI is no longer an option,” Julia Liuson, president of developer tools, told employees in June. Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke said in April that there was a “basic expectation” in which employees use AI in their daily work, and that “before they seek more people and resources, teams need to show why they can't use AI to get what they want to do.”

Alphabet's personnel are ticking by the moment in recent quarter, but still below its peak since 2023, with nearly 191,000 full-time employees. The number was just over 187,000 at the end of June, according to Alphabet's quarterly financial returns last week. Google eliminated about 6% of its workforce in early 2023, and has since implemented cuts in various groups, providing acquisitions to employees since the start of the year.

“We are going to go through a much higher period of investment. I think we need to be satisfied with our resources. I will strive to be more productive and efficient as a company,” Pichai said.

Google declined to comment on the statement.

At the meeting, Saluzzo highlighted many of the tools the company is building to help software engineers or SWES “everyone at Google become more AI-savvy.”

“We see speeds increase much more rapidly as we feel urgently to incorporate AI into our coding workflows more quickly and urgently and meet our best needs,” Salzzo said.

Saluzzo said Google will have a portfolio of AI products available to employees “faster.” He mentioned an internal site called “AI SavvyGoogle,” with courses, toolkits and learning sessions that include individual product areas.

Google's Engineering Education Team developing courses for internal and external use; Saluzzo said the company is partnering with Deepmind for a training called “Building with Gemini” which will soon begin promotions. He also referenced a new internal AI coding tool called CIDER, which helps software engineers with different aspects of the development process.

Since May, when the company first introduced Cider, 50% of users tap on the service weekly, Saluzzo said. Regarding Google's internal AI tools, Saluzzo said employees should “hope to get better on a continuous basis,” and “will become a fairly integral part of most SWE jobs.”

Google made a big splash in the AI coding market earlier this month, snapping key executives at high-profile startup Windsurf as part of a $2.4 billion deal. Varun Mohan, co-founder and CEO of Windsurf, joins Google along with other senior research and development employees.

Pichai referred to Mohan's “acquisition” and said at the meeting about Windsurf's founding team and engineers, “I think they'll be very useful in this area as well.”

clock: Google takes Windsurf CEO