Google CEO Pichai tells employees to gear up for big 2025: ‘The stakes are high’
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai gestures during a session at the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos, on January 22, 2020.
Fabrice COFFRINI | AFP | Getty Images
Google CEO Sundar Pichai told employees last week that “the stakes are high” for 2025, as the company faces increased competition and regulatory hurdles and contends with rapid advancements in artificial intelligence.
At a 2025 strategy meeting on Dec. 18, Pichai and other Google leaders, donning ugly holiday sweaters, hyped up the coming year, most notably as it pertains to what’s coming in AI, according to audio obtained by CNBC.
“I think 2025 will be critical,” Pichai said. “I think it’s really important we internalize the urgency of this moment, and need to move faster as a company. The stakes are high. These are disruptive moments. In 2025, we need to be relentlessly focused on unlocking the benefits of this technology and solve real user problems.”
Some employees attended the meeting in person at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, and others tuned in virtually.
Pichai’s comments come after a year packed with some of the most intense pressure Google has experienced since going public two decades ago. While areas like search ads and cloud produced strong revenue growth, competition picked up in Google’s core markets, and the company faced internal challenges including culture clashes and concerns about Pichai’s vision for the future.
Additionally, regulation is now heavier than ever.
In August, a federal judge ruled that Google illegally holds a monopoly in the search market. The Justice Department in November asked that Google be forced to divest its Chrome internet browser unit. In a separate case, the DOJ accused the company of illegally dominating online ad technology. That trial closed in September and awaits a judge ruling.
That same month, Britain’s competition watchdog issued a statement of objections over Google’s ad tech practices, which the regulator provisionally found are impacting competition in the U.K.
“It’s not lost on me that we are facing scrutiny across the world,” Pichai said. “It comes with our size and success. It’s part of a broader trend where tech is now impacting society at scale. So more than ever, through this moment, we have to make sure we don’t get distracted.”
A Google spokesperson declined to comment.
Google’s search business still has dominant market share, but generative AI has served up all sorts of new ways for people to access online information, and has brought with it a host of new competitors.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT kicked off the hype cycle in late 2022, and investors including Microsoft have since propelled the company to a $157 billion valuation. In July, OpenAI announced it would launch a search engine of its own. Perplexity is also promoting its AI-powered search service and recently closed a $500 million funding round at a $9 billion valuation.
Google is investing heavily to try and stay on top, principally through Gemini, its AI model. The Gemini app gives users access to a number of tools, including Google’s chatbot.
Pichai said “building big, new business” is a top priority. That includes the Gemini app, which executives said they see as Google’s next app to reach half a billion users. The company currently has 15 apps that have hit that mark.
“With the Gemini app, there is strong momentum, particularly over the last few months,” Pichai said. “But we have some work to do in 2025 to close the gap and establish a leadership position there as well.”
“Scaling Gemini on the consumer side will be our biggest focus next year,” Pichai later added.
‘Don’t always have to be first’
At the meeting, Pichai showed a chart of large language models, with Gemini 1.5 leading OpenAI’s GPT and other competitors.
“I expect some back and forth” in 2025, Pichai said. “I think we’ll be state of the art.”
He acknowledged that Google has had to play catchup.
“In history, you don’t always need to be first but you have to execute well and really be the best in class as a product,” he said. “I think that’s what 2025 is all about.”
Executives took questions that were submitted by employees through Google’s internal system. One comment read aloud by Pichai suggested that ChatGPT “is becoming synonymous to AI the same way Google is to search,” with the questioner asking, “What’s our plan to combat this in the upcoming year? Or are we not focusing as much on consumer facing LLM?”
For the answer, Pichai turned to DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis, who said that teams are going to “turbo charge” the Gemini app and that the company has seen progress in the number of users since launching the app in February. He said “the products themselves are going to evolve massively over the next year or two.”
Hassabis described a vision for a universal assistant that “can seamlessly operate over any domain, any modality or any device.”
Project Astra, Google’s experimental version of a universal assistant that the company announced in May, will be updated in the first half of the year.
Another employee question asked whether Google will be able to get AI products to scale without charging $200 a month “like other companies.”
“Right now, we don’t have any plans for this kind of subscription level,” Hassabis responded, adding that he thinks the $20 monthly charge for Gemini advanced is a good value. “I wouldn’t necessarily say never but there are no plans for that at the moment.”
Toward the end of the meeting, Google welcomed to the stage Josh Woodward, the head of Google Labs. He took the microphone as the Zombie Nation song “Kernkraft 400” played loudly in the background.
“I’m going to try to do six demos in eight minutes,” said Woodward, who’s known for his high level of energy.
Woodward started by showing off Jules, a coding assistant that’s in a trusted tester’s program. He said, “It’s where the future of software development is headed.”
Woodward then shifted to AI notetaking product NotebookLM, which featured a series of updates in 2024, including a podcasting tool. Woodward demonstrated how the company is trying a new feature that allows the user to “call in” to a podcast.
He then moved onto Project Mariner, an AI-powered multi-tasking Chrome extension. Woodward asked it to add the top restaurants from Tripadvisor to the Maps app. After a brief pause, the demo successfully worked, leading employees in attendance to erupt in applause.
Throughout the meeting, Pichai kept reminding employees of the need to “stay scrappy.” Google has gone through an extensive phase of cost cutting that included eliminating about 6% of its workforce in 2023 and a continued focus on efficiency.
As of the end of the third quarter, Alphabet had 181,269 employees, down about 5% from the end of 2022.
At one point, Pichai referenced Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who started the company 26 years ago, long before cloud computing or AI tools existed.
“In early Google days, you look at how the founders built our data centers, they were really really scrappy in every decision they made,” Pichai said. “Often, constraints lead to creativity. Not all problems are always solved by headcount.”
The Intel logo is displayed on a sign in front of Intel headquarters on July 16, 2025 in Santa Clara, California.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
Intel reported second-quarter results on Thursday that beat Wall Street expectations on revenue, as the company’s new CEO Lip-Bu Tan announced significant cuts in chip factory construction. The stock ticked higher in extended trading.
Here’s how the chipmaker did versus LSEG consensus estimates:
- Earnings per share: Loss of 10 cents per share, adjusted.
- Revenue: $12.86 billion versus $11.92 billion estimated
Intel said it expects revenue for the third-quarter of $13.1 billion at the midpoint of its range, versus the average analyst estimate of $12.65 billion. The chipmaker said that it expects to break even on earnings while analysts were looking for earnings of 4 cents per share.
For the second quarter, Intel reported a net loss of $2.9 billion, or 67 cents per share, compared with a $1.61 billion net loss, or 38 cents per share, in the year-earlier period. Earnings per share were not comparable to analyst estimates due to an $800 million impairment charge, “related to excess tools with no identified re-use,” the company said. That resulted in an EPS adjustment of about 20 cents.
The report was Intel’s second since Lip-Bu Tan took over as CEO in March, promising to make the chipmaker’s products competitive again, and to reduce bureaucracy and layers of management, including slashing staff in Oregon and California.
In a memo to employees published on Thursday, Tan said that the first few months of his tenure had “not been easy.” He said that the company had “completed the majority” of its planned layoffs, amounting to 15% of the workforce, and that it plans to end the year with 75,000 employees. Intel previously said it was trying to reduce operating expenses by $17 billion in 2025.
Intel shares are up about 13% this year as of Thursday’s close after plummeting 60% in 2024, their worst year on record.
Tan also announced several other spending cuts in the memo, particularly in the company’s costly foundry division, which makes chips for other companies and is still looking for a big customer to anchor the business.
Intel said its foundry business had an operating loss of $3.17 billion on $4.4 billion in revenue.
Tan said that Intel had cancelled planned fab projects in Germany and Poland, and will consolidate its testing and assembly operations in Vietnam and Malaysia. He added that the company would slow down the pace of its construction of a cutting-edge chip factory in Ohio, depending on market demand and if it can secure big customers for the facility.
“Over the past several years, the company invested too much, too soon – without adequate demand,” Tan wrote. “In the process, our factory footprint became needlessly fragmented and underutilized.”
Tan wrote that the company’s forthcoming chip manufacturing process, called 14A, will be built out based on confirmed customer commitments.
“There are no more blank checks. Every investment must make economic sense,” Tan wrote.
The company’s client computing group, which is primarily comprised of sales of central processors for PCs, had $7.9 billion in sales, down 3% on an annual basis.
Revenue in the data center group, which includes some AI chips but is mostly central processors for servers, rose 4% to $3.9 billion. Tan wrote in his memo that Intel wants to regain market share in data center chips, and is looking for a permanent leader for the business. Longtime rival Advanced Micro Devices has increasingly been winning server business from cloud customers.
Tan added he would personally review and approve all chip designs before they are taped out, which is the final step of the design process before a new chip is manufactured.
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