Venture capital firm’s plan to buy nonprofit hospital system has Ohio community on edge
Dr. Marc Harrison, who’s now CEO of HATCo, speaking at the Healthy Returns conference in New York City on May 21, 2019.
Astrid Stawiarz | CNBC
Dr. Marc Harrison is a different kind of venture capitalist.
He’s not looking for the next Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk. He’s not hanging out at startup demo days. He’s definitely not posting life advice screeds to founders on X. (He hardly posts at all.)
Far removed from the internet hub of Silicon Valley, Harrison went to medical school in the late 1980s and has spent the bulk of the past two decades at the upper ranks of medical systems, most recently as CEO of Intermountain Healthcare, a Utah-based nonprofit with 33 hospitals and over 63,000 employees.
In late 2022, Harrison joined venture firm General Catalyst, which has backed tech highfliers like Stripe, Snap and Airbnb. But the move to VC from health care hardly represented a career change.
In January, General Catalyst announced it was buying Summa Health, a nonprofit integrated health system that supports more than 1,000 inpatient beds across its network of hospitals, community-based health centers and its multi-specialty group practice. Summa operates across five counties in northeast Ohio and also runs a health insurance entity.
Under its new structure, Summa will become a for-profit organization, and General Catalyst says it will introduce new tech-enabled solutions that aim to make care more accessible and affordable.
General Catalyst set the stage for the deal when it brought in Harrison and, a year later, introduced a new company called the Health Assurance Transformation Corporation, or HATCo, that would operate on a “decades-long time horizon.” Harrison was named HATCo CEO, and is now in charge of overseeing its work with Summa.
“This is the first time that anybody has done anything quite like this,” Harrison, 60, told CNBC in an interview. “There are many digital health solutions that are out there as point solutions. This is the first holistic transformation of a health system to a thoughtful combination of digital and in-person care.”
The deal isn’t done.
Over the next several months, HATCo and Summa will engage in a due diligence period, work to craft a definitive agreement and begin to map out the specific challenges they hope to tackle. In the latter half of the year, the transaction will go through the regulatory approval process.
The parties declined to share specific financial details about the acquisition with CNBC, but HATCo wants to make clear that this isn’t just “another ‘private equity’ deal,” Harrison wrote in a statement. By that, he means the objective isn’t to overhaul Summa by cutting costs.
Summa Health Medina Medical Center
Courtesy: Summa Health
History in health care
While buying a hospital is an unprecedented move in the venture industry, where firms rake in big piles of money from institutional investors and seek to outperform the market, General Catalyst has a rich history in the broader health-care sector.
The 24-year-old firm has closed the most deals in digital health since 2020, according to data from PitchBook. Its portfolio companies in the space include insurer Oscar and digital health company Livongo, which was acquired by Teladoc almost four years ago.
Hospitals are different though, and many are nonprofits for a reason. Providing health care is expensive, and reimbursement rates can vary dramatically. With patients shouldering so much of the load, a study last year by the Urban Institute found that 73% of adults with medical debt owe hospitals at least some of that money.
An October report from Fitch Ratings said labor costs “remain stubbornly high,” and that controlling these expenses will be crucial if nonprofit hospitals want to reduce credit pressure and deliver stronger margins.
Conditions are not likely to change overnight.
“We expect weak margins to persist through 2023 and into 2024 due to an inelastic revenue model and higher labor costs due to still very tight labor conditions,” Fitch said.
General Catalyst says it wants Summa to serve as a “blueprint” that shows other health systems how delivering better care for patients can also be “good for business.”
Experts like Ceci Connolly have concerns. Connolly, CEO of the Alliance of Community Health Plans, which represents nonprofit provider-aligned regional health plans, said she’s excited to see if the deal presents a new approach that can address some of the problems in health care. She’s just not sure how it will work.
“I would be lying if I didn’t say it gives me a little bit of pause that you are going to take a nonprofit, community-based health-care entity, and now have it answering to investors and needing to generate profits,” Connolly said.
Connolly’s viewpoint makes sense. Limited partners — the endowments, sovereign wealth funds and pensions systems that put money into venture capital — look to the asset class as a bet on innovation in tech. It’s where billions can get minted on a single lucky bet.
“A lot of people feel like a PE or venture capital company owning a hospital is kind of like asking Freddy Krueger to come babysit your kids,” said John Bass, CEO of the health-care venture studio Hashed Health. “It just makes people a little nervous, and it doesn’t feel quite aligned with this concept of health care being a human right.”
Still, Bass said he’s “thrilled” to see General Catalyst take big swings in health-care innovation, given all the challenges the industry faces.
HATCo is capitalized outside of General Catalyst’s funds structure. It operates as a holding company within General Catalyst and is completely independent from its venture business, the firm says, though it will collaborate with the investment team.
General Catalyst said HATCo is not designed to realize returns through increases in volume-based revenue or cost cutting. Instead, it will work to generate new revenue streams by introducing new solutions and models of care.
Chris Bischoff has been leading General Catalyst’s health investments since 2021. The firm has been in the space for more than a decade, and Bischoff said it’s come to view the health-care business as having two distinct but interrelated parts.
The first is the “innovation side,” or the more traditional venture business, where General Catalyst works with entrepreneurs to create and scale new solutions. The second is the “transformation side,” which now includes HATCo. The goal there is to partner with health systems to try and speed up delivery and roll out new tools.
“We see a really powerful flywheel between the two,” Bischoff told CNBC in an interview.
Chris Bischoff speaks at Slush 2023.
Courtesy of General Catalyst
General Catalyst has teamed up with more than 20 health systems across the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Israel as part of its transformation business. The partnerships are designed to share best practices and encourage collaboration. Bischoff said they help reduce friction when it comes to tech deployment, eliminating the need for a bunch of third parties to get involved.
Some partners include HCA Healthcare, University of California Davis Health and Intermountain Healthcare, Harrison’s former employer. In a book published last year about his work at Intermountain, Harrison wrote that General Catalyst was helping the hospital build a new marketplace, much like the App Store, for health care.
“Think of it this way: Major airlines don’t build their own air-planes,” he wrote. “They work with a range of partners to help them deliver their offerings. To revolutionize how we care for patients, we in health care are doing the same.”
The matter is personal for Harrison.
In 2009, he was diagnosed with bladder cancer, which was remedied thanks to “aggressive surgical treatment,” Harrison wrote in his book.
But almost a decade later, he was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a form of blood cancer, and things looked dire. After a failed bone marrow transplant, Harrison said he “scrambled” and tried a novel immunotherapy that eventually helped him get his condition under control.
“I don’t know how long this treatment and others I might try will contain my disease, so I’m not wasting a minute,” Harrison wrote.
If his athletic accomplishments are any indication, Harrison isn’t one to back down from a grueling fight. He’s a nine-time Ironman participant who represented the U.S. in 2014 at the world triathlon championship.
‘There’s a lot of unused capacity’
Michael Greeley, co-founder and general partner at the health tech VC firm Flare Capital Partners, said the health-care provider world is in “acute distress” as many organizations are trying to operate on “razor thin profit margins.”
“There’s a lot of unused capacity, like beds that are empty, because they literally don’t have the labor to clean the rooms,” Greeley told CNBC in an interview. “It’s a high fixed-costs business that, if you can’t drive the volume through it, you’re gonna lose money.”
On its FAQ page about the acquisition, Summa said it’s in “sound financial standing” and on track to meet its targets. The organization reported $1.79 billion in revenue in 2022, up from $1.67 billion in 2021, according to Summa’s annual reports.
However, the organization said it would have a limited capacity to invest in growth or other improvements within its existing structure since challenges like supply costs will continue to hurt its bottom line.
Summa had been on the market for a partner since 2018. The next year it announced plans to merge with the Michigan-based system Beaumont Health. The organizations reached a definitive agreement that December, but Beaumont, now Corewell Health, suddenly pulled out months later without offering a public explanation.
Summa Health System – Akron Campus
Courtesy: Summa Health
Dr. Cliff Deveny, Summa’s CEO, said that in the years that followed, the organization hadn’t been able to find a health system with adequate digital health resources and technological ambitions, especially since many large providers are contending with similar financial constraints.
“We had been on about a 10-year journey of growing, but not really making the transformational changes in and how we run our business,” Deveny told CNBC in an interview. “We saw this as a way to really pivot and change how we provide care.”
HATCo set its sights on Summa after scanning the broader health-care environment. Harrison said he was fortunate to meet Deveny early in the search.
Summa’s executive leadership team will remain intact, and the organization says it will continue to provide the same services to patients and the greater community.
Harrison said the executives will have to remain careful and rigorous about managing traditional operations, but that they will now have additional “money, time, people, technology.”
“This is not like a turnaround, this is not a distressed system,” Harrison said. “This is an excellent system that has weathered maybe the most difficult time in health care that anybody’s ever experienced, and they’ve done it well. And now they’re ready to go to the next level.”
HATCo said its primary objective is to bring sustainable and agile innovation to Summa, particularly through the introduction of new platforms and tech solutions. The organization will also transition to what’s known as a value-based care model, which incentivizes preventative care and keeping patients healthy as opposed to charging fees for services like appointments and procedures.
It’s an expensive undertaking, and aligning insurance payers, clinicians and patients behind a value-based care model is often easier said than done.
Harrison said HATCo will likely use tech solutions from some of General Catalyst’s portfolio companies, as well as from others. The tech companies HATCo taps will be on the mature side, not early-stage startups, he added.
Ben Sutton, Summa’s operating chief, said the two organizations are also still evaluating what introducing new technologies will look like in practice.
“We want to build it from the ground up,” Sutton told CNBC. “We really want to make sure that we’re tailoring those solutions to the challenges that we’re having here in Akron and in the region that we serve, and make sure that we’re implementing things that are most impactful immediately.”
Additionally, Summa will no longer operate as a nonprofit system. Summa said on its website it will start a new community foundation in order to maintain its commitment to charity care, but the Summa Health Foundation will no longer be operational.
We’re not ‘guinea pigs’
Summa supports a workforce of around 8,500 people, making it the largest employer in Summit County, home to the city of Akron. There’s some fear among the locals about what happens next.
At a luncheon in late January, Akron Mayor Shammas Malik said residents and employees have expressed some confusion and concern about the deal, according to a report by Ideastream Public Media. More than 450 people have signed a petition urging Summa to remain a nonprofit and to halt negotiations with HATCo.
James Hardy, a member of Akron’s city council, said during a meeting on Jan. 22, that he opposed the sale, citing a “moral objection to the use of Summa, its staff and its patients as ‘guinea pigs’ for venture capitalists.”
During his more than six-minute speech, which was met at the end with scattered applause, Hardy went on to ask that Summa pause the process and consider alternatives like converting the hospital to a “county-owned system.”
“The community has not been consulted at all and we stand to gain or lose the most at the outcome of this proposal,” Hardy said. “At the very least, Summa owes greater Akron a transparent process where concerns and questions of the general public are asked and answered.”
Mayor Malik met with Harrison and Summa executives early in February, following the city council meeting, and had a “positive and thoughtful conversation” about their ambitions to create a “new model” for health care instead of making cuts, the mayor said in a statement to CNBC.
“When looking at the proposed Summa acquisition, there are plenty of fair and understandable concerns,” Malik said in a statement. “There is also the potential for this to be a very positive and transformative step for Summa, stabilizing a pillar of our community.”
Harrison has dealt with competing concerns in the past. In his book, he wrote about steering Intermountain during the Covid pandemic, when health-care workers, government officials and Utah residents openly disagreed about the right path forward.
“Rather than avoiding conflict or seeking to ram through it, we’ve accepted it as a fact of life and attempted to manage it adroitly and compassionately on behalf of progress,” Harrison wrote.
HATCo has a complex, decades-long road ahead, and Harrison is now at the center of an effort to show that community-based health-care providers can be profitable without cutting costs or abandoning patients.
Flare Capital’s Greeley said other VCs are unlikely to follow General Catalyst’s lead because of all the costs and complexities involved in owning a hospital system. But he said he’s cheering the firm on from the sidelines.
“Hats off,” he said. “If anybody can pull it off, I think they’ll have a reasonably good shot.”
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.”
OpenAI said Friday that in moving toward a new for-profit structure in 2025, the company will create a public benefit corporation to oversee commercial operations, removing some of its nonprofit restrictions and allowing it to function more like a high-growth startup.
“The hundreds of billions of dollars that major companies are now investing into AI development show what it will really take for OpenAI to continue pursuing the mission,” OpenAI’s board wrote in the post. “We once again need to raise more capital than we’d imagined. Investors want to back us but, at this scale of capital, need conventional equity and less structural bespokeness.”
The pressure on OpenAI is tied to its $157 billion valuation, achieved in the two years since the company launched its viral chatbot, ChatGPT, and kicked off the boom in generative artificial intelligence. OpenAI closed its latest $6.6 billion round in October, gearing up to aggressively compete with Elon Musk’s xAI as well as Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Anthropic in a market that’s predicted to top $1 trillion in revenue within a decade.
Developing the large language models at the heart of ChatGPT and other generative AI products requires an ongoing investment in high-powered processors, provided largely by Nvidia, and cloud infrastructure, which OpenAI largely receives from top backer Microsoft.
OpenAI expects about $5 billion in losses on $3.7 billion in revenue this year, CNBC confirmed in September. Those numbers are increasing rapidly.
By transforming into a Delaware PBC “with ordinary shares of stock,” OpenAI says it can pursue commercial operations, while separately hiring a staff for its nonprofit arm and allowing that wing to take on charitable activities in health care, education and science.
The nonprofit will have a “significant interest” in the PBC “at a fair valuation determined by independent financial advisors,” OpenAI wrote.
OpenAI’s complicated structure as it exists today is the result of its creation as a nonprofit in 2015. It was founded by CEO Sam Altman, Musk and others as a research lab focused on artificial general intelligence, or AGI, which was an entirely futuristic concept at the time.
In 2019, OpenAI aimed to move past its role as solely a research lab in hopes of functioning more like a startup, so it created a so-called capped-profit model, with the nonprofit still controlling the overall entity.
“Our current structure does not allow the Board to directly consider the interests of those who would finance the mission and does not enable the nonprofit to easily do more than control the for-profit,” OpenAI wrote in Friday’s post.
OpenAI added that the change would “enable us to raise the necessary capital with conventional terms like our competitors.”
Musk’s opposition
OpenAI’s efforts to restructure face some major hurdles. The most significant is Musk, who is in the midst of a heated legal battle with Altman that could have a significant impact on the company’s future.
In recent months, Musk has sued OpenAI and asked a court to stop the company from converting to a for-profit corporation from a nonprofit. In posts on X, he described that effort as a “total scam” and claimed that “OpenAI is evil.” Earlier this month, OpenAI clapped back, alleging that in 2017 Musk “not only wanted, but actually created, a for-profit” to serve as the company’s proposed new structure.
In addition to its face-off with Musk, OpenAI has been dealing with an outflow of high-level talent, due in part to concerns that the company has focused on taking commercial products to market at the expense of safety.
In late September, OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati announced she would depart the company after 6½ years. That same day, research chief Bob McGrew and Barret Zoph, a research vice president, also announced they were leaving. A month earlier, co-founder John Schulman said he was leaving for rival startup Anthropic.
Altman said during a September interview at Italian Tech Week that recent executive departures were not related to the company’s potential restructuring: “We have been thinking about that — our board has — for almost a year independently, as we think about what it takes to get to our next stage,” he said.
Those weren’t the first big-name exits. In May, OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever and former safety leader Jan Leike announced their departures, with Leike also joining Anthropic.
Leike wrote in a social media post at the time that disagreements with leadership about company priorities drove his decision.
“Over the past years, safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products,” he wrote.
One employee, who worked under Leike, quit soon after him, writing on X in September that “OpenAI was structured as a non-profit, but it acted like a for-profit.” The employee added, “You should not believe OpenAI when it promises to do the right thing later.”
NEW YORK, NY – NOVEMBER 01: Sundar Pichai, C.E.O., Google Inc. speaks at the New York Times DealBook conference on November 1, 2018 in New York City. (Photo by Stephanie Keith/Getty Images)
Stephanie Keith | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Google’s blowout earnings report in April, which sparked the biggest rally in Alphabet shares since 2015 and pushed its market cap past $2 trillion for the first time, tempered fear that the company was falling behind in artificial intelligence.
As executives enthusiastically talked about the results with Google’s employees at an all-hands meeting the following week, it was clear that Wall Street viewed things differently than the company’s workforce.
“We’ve noticed a significant decline in morale, increased distrust and a disconnect between leadership and the workforce,” one employee wrote in a comment that was read by executives at the meeting. “How does leadership plan to address these concerns and regain the trust, morale and cohesion that have been foundational to our company’s success?”
The comment was highly rated on an internal forum.
“Despite the company’s stellar performance and record earnings, many Googlers have not received meaningful compensation increases” another top-rated employee question read.
That meeting set the stage for what would be a year of contrasting takes from the company’s vocal workforce. As Google faced some of the most intense pressure its experienced since going public two decades ago, so too did CEO Sundar Pichai, who took the helm in 2015.
Pichai oversaw a steady stream of revenue growth this year in key areas like search ads and cloud. The company rolled out groundbreaking technologies, rounded out its AI strategy despite a slew of embarrassing product incidents and saw its stock price rise more than 40% as of Thursday’s close, ahead of the S&P 500 but trailing rivals Meta and Amazon.
Over the course of 2024, many staffers questioned Pichai’s vision following product mishaps in the first half of the year as well as internal shake-ups and layoffs, according to conversations with more than a dozen employees, audio recordings and internal correspondence.
As the second half of the year progressed and Google rolled out a number of eye-catching AI products, Pichai’s standing improved, though some skepticism remains, sources told CNBC.
Google DeepMind chief Demis Hassabis (L) and Google chief executive Sundar Pichai open the tech titan’s annual I/O developers conference focusing on how artificial intelligence is being woven into search, email, virtual meetings and more.
Glenn Chapman | AFP | Getty Images
The AI race pressure cooker
After the introduction of ChatGPT in late 2022, the tech industry saw an influx of AI products from Microsoft, with its Copilot AI assistant, and Meta, which placed its Meta AI chatbot in the search functions of its apps, as well as from hot startups like OpenAI and Perplexity.
The popularity of those tools has eaten into Google’s grip on U.S. search. The company’s share of the search advertising market is expected to dip below 50% in 2025, which would be the first time falling below that mark in more than a decade, according to research firm eMarketer.
Google responded to the pressures from new AI tools with offerings of its own. The company in 2024 rebranded its family of AI models as Gemini and released a number of products that were well received. But in its scramble to play catch-up, the company also released a pair of AI products that initially proved embarrassing.
In February, Google launched Imagen 2, which turned user prompts into AI-generated images. Immediately after it was introduced, the product came under scrutiny for historical inaccuracies discovered by users. Notably, when one user asked it to show a German soldier in 1943, the tool depicted a racially diverse set of soldiers wearing German military uniforms of the era.
The company pulled the feature, and Pichai told employees the company had “offended our users and shown bias,” according to a memo. Google said it would take a few weeks to relaunch Imagen 2, but it ended up being six months before it was revived as Imagen 3 in August.
“We definitely messed up on the image generation,” Google co-founder Sergey Brin told a small crowd at a hacker house in March, in a video posted to YouTube. “It was mostly due to just not thorough testing.”
The launch of AI Overview in May caused a similar reaction.
That product showed users AI summaries atop Google’s traditional search results. Pichai hyped the product, calling it the biggest change to search in 25 years. Once again, users were quick to find problems.
When asked “How many rocks should I eat each day,” the tool said, “According to UC Berkeley geologists, people should eat at least one small rock a day.” AI Overview also listed the vitamins and digestive benefits of rocks.
Google responded by saying it would add more guardrails to AI Overview for health-related queries but said the mistakes weren’t hallucinations, and were rather just rare edge cases. Search Vice President Liz Reid told employees at an all-hands meeting in June that AI Overview’s launch shouldn’t discourage them from taking risks.
“We should act with urgency,” Reid said. “When we find new problems, we should do the extensive testing but we won’t always find everything and that just means that we respond.”
Jaque Silva | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Beyond its AI blunders, Google also saw its greatest regulatory challenges to date in 2024.
In August, a federal judge ruled that the company 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 as a remedy for the ruling
The DOJ’s request represents the agency’s most aggressive attempt to break up a tech company since its antitrust case against Microsoft, which reached a settlement in 2001.
The remedies are expected to be decided next summer, and Google has said it will appeal, likely dragging out the situation a couple more years, but the company faces more antitrust hurdles.
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. In October, a U.S. judge issued a permanent injunction that will force Google to offer alternatives to its Google Play app store for Android phones. After the ruling in October, Google won a temporary pause on the ruling, meaning it won’t have to open up Android to more app stores yet.
A search for vision
Amid the external pressure, Google notched some notable victories particularly toward the end of 2024, leading to a more positive sentiment from people within and outside the company.
Google successfully launched its most powerful suite of new Gemini models that underpin all of the company’s AI products, including its lightweight model Gemini Flash, which has been popular among developers. YouTube’s combined ad and subscription revenue over the past four quarters surpassed $50 billion.
In the third quarter, Google saw the fastest-growing cloud business across the big tech players, up 35% over last year, with operating margins of 17%. The company has also seen double-digit revenue growth for each of the past four quarters and launched Trillium, its powerful sixth generation Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs, which were also found to have powered Apple’s AI models.
Despite the blunders, AI Overview reached nearly 1 billion monthly users by the end of October. Demand for AI software has also driven consistent growth for the company’s cloud infrastructure. And Google launched an impressive video generation product, Veo 2, this month as well as an updated AI note-taking product, NotebookLM.
Beyond AI, Google in December announced Willow, a chip the company calls its biggest step in the march toward commercially viable quantum computing. The Waymo self-driving car unit was also a bright spot, expanding its robotaxi service to three cities and laying the groundwork for even more expansion in 2025. The company has delivered 4 million fully autonomous rides this year, with plans to commercially launch in Austin, Texas, and Atlanta next year.
A Google quantum processor “Sycamore” is held up to the camera wearing blue gloves. In 2019, Google made a breakthrough in quantum computing.
Peter Kneffel | Picture Alliance | Getty Images
But as Pichai approaches a decade running Google and starts his sixth year as CEO of parent Alphabet, questions remain about his ability to guide the company into the future.
Internally, employees routinely criticize leadership on the company’s Memegen messaging board, and some have aired their grievances publicly.
“Google does not have one single visionary leader,” a Google software engineer wrote in a LinkedIn post earlier this year that received more than 8,500 reactions. “Not a one. From the C-suite to the SVPs to the VPs, they are all profoundly boring and glassy-eyed.”
In October, Google announced it would shake up the leadership of its ads and search division.
The company replaced longtime search boss Prabhakar Raghavan with Nick Fox, a deputy of Raghavan’s and a career Google employee. Raghavan was given the title of “chief scientist,” but internally, he is now listed as an “IC,” or individual contributor.
Google also shifted the team working on its Gemini AI app to the Google DeepMind division, under AI head Demis Hassabis. Employees praised Pichai’s leadership shuffle, but some complained that the moves should’ve happened sooner.
Notably, some employees were perturbed when Raghavan addressed employees at an all-hands meeting in April, when he urged them to move faster, according to several people who spoke with CNBC. Raghavan noted that the staffers working to fix the failed Imagen 2 tool had increased their workloads from 100 hours a week to 120 hours to correct it in a timely manner.
Pichai has made efforts to get Google back to its nimble startup-like culture.
When addressing employees, Pichai often name-checked co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page to remind them of Google’s scrappy roots. He’s flattened the company, removing 10% of middle management, according to audio of a December all-hands meeting. And in the spring, Pichai greenlit a hackathon, allowing employees to build using Google products that have yet to be announced. Pichai has also personally joined meetings with Google’s Labs team and enabled them to move quickly on products like NotebookLM, one of the company’s hit AI products in 2024.
Google Co-Founder Sergey Brin speaks during a press conference after the third game of the Google DeepMind Challenge Match against Google-developed supercomputer AlphaGo at a hotel in Seoul on March 12, 2016.
Jung Yeon-Je | AFP | Getty Images
After Brin’s hacker house appearance in March, some employees internally joked he should retake the helm, nostalgic for what they perceived as a visionary leader devoid of corporate speak.
Brin co-founded Google with Page in 1998, but he stepped down as president of Alphabet in 2019. Brin, who remains a board member and a principal shareholder with a stake worth more than $140 billion, began appearing more frequently on campus starting in 2023, as part of an effort to help ramp up Google’s position in the hypercompetitive AI market. Employees, particularly working in AI and DeepMind said they’ve seen Brin walking around the company’s Mountain View, California, headquarters throughout the year and have been able to ask him questions for projects they’re pursuing.
Despite Brin’s reemergence, several employees told CNBC they’re doubtful he could adequately run what has become an increasingly larger and complex corporation.
Employees said that although Pichai didn’t strike them as particularly visionary or as a wartime leader, it’s hard to find someone better suited for the job, given all the complexities of Alphabet. The key quandary remains: move too early and risk widespread criticism; move too late and risk missing the boat.
Culture Clashes
Through the year, morale inside Google wavered. Efforts to cut costs across the company in order to invest more in AI resulted in some teams feeling bifurcated and created yet another challenge for Pichai.
Within the company’s AI and DeepMind divisions, morale is mostly high, according to employees, boosted by hefty investments. Elsewhere, the vibes have been marred by cost cuts, bureaucracy and declining trust in leadership, employees said.
DeepMind and AI teams have held off-sites, team-building activities, and have much bigger travel and recruiting budgets, people familiar with the matter said. In the spring, the company moved employees out of an eight-story office on San Francisco’s waterfront Embarcadero street and replaced them with AI and AI adjacent teams.
Google DeepMind co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Demis Hassabis gives a conference during the Mobile World Congress (MWC), the telecom industry’s biggest annual gathering, in Barcelona on February 26, 2024.
Pau Barrena | Afp | Getty Images
A meme posted internally in November summed it up.
The meme featured a photo of the cast of “Wicked” actors, where one, labeled “execs” looked longingly at one fellow actor labeled “Gemini” while ignoring the other beside her, which was labeled as “users.”
A Google spokesperson contested the idea that AI workers are receiving favorable treatment and said higher travel and recruiting budgets are not exclusive to AI teams or DeepMind.
“Most Googlers, regardless of team, continue to feel positively about our mission and the company’s future, and are proud to work here,” the spokesperson said.
A few employees say they’re no longer incentivized by the prospects of landing a promotion, which have become harder to achieve, and rather by the hope of avoiding layoffs.
Despite slashing 12,000 jobs, or roughly 6% of its workforce, in 2023, Google has continued eliminating roles this year. In her first public statements as Google’s CFO, Anat Ashkenazi, told Wall Street in October that one of her top priorities would be to drive more “cost efficiencies” across the company in order to invest more in AI.
“I think any organization can always push a little further and I’ll be looking at additional opportunities,” Ashkenazi said.
That month, Google posted a job listing for a “Central Reorg Support Team Partner.” The responsibilities of that fixed-term contract position would include consulting with local HR teams and noted the need for the support staff’s “ability to operate with empathy and diffuse/de-escalate challenging conversations/situations.”
“Hire the smartest people so they can tell us what to do,” one employee wrote on the internal forum in meme-style font atop the images of Brin and Page. “Hire a reorg consultant so they can tell us how to layoff the smartest people,” another said.
Google ultimately took the job listing down.
Pro-Palestinian protesters are blocked the Google I/O developer conference entrance to protest Google’s Project Nimbus and Israeli attacks on Gaza and Rafah, at its headquarters in Mountain View, California, United States on May 14, 2024.
Tayfun Coskun | Anadolu | Getty Images
Touting its AI technology to clients, Pichai’s leadership team has been aggressively pursuing federal government contracts, which has caused a heightened strain in some areas within the outspoken workforce since the beginning of the year.
Google terminated more than 50 employees after a series of protests against Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion joint contract with Amazon that provides the Israeli government and military with cloud computing and AI services. Executives repeatedly said the contract didn’t violate any of the company’s “AI principles.”
However, documents and reports show the company’s agreement allowed for giving Israel AI tools that included image categorization, object tracking, as well as provisions for state-owned weapons manufacturers. Earlier this month, a New York Times report found that four months prior to signing on to Nimbus, officials at the company worried that signing the deal would harm its reputation and that “Google Cloud services could be used for, or linked to, the facilitation of human rights violations.”
In an all-hands meeting in April, a highly rated question asked why employees who did not participate in the protests were also fired, which was reported and cited in a National Labor Relations Board complaint from affected employees. Chris Rackow, Google’s security chief, took the stage at the all-hands and rebutted those claims.
“This was a very clear case of employees disrupting and occupying work spaces, and making other employees feel unsafe,” a Google spokesperson told CNBC, adding that the company “carefully confirmed” that every person terminated was involved in the protests. “By any standard, their behavior was completely unacceptable.”
That round of job eliminations underscored Google’s clampdown on internal discussions related to hot-button topics, including politics and geopolitical conflicts, which was encouraged by executives several years prior.
One internal meme that got more than 2,000 likes, compared Google to Star Wars’ Anakin Skywalker. The meme shows an image of a smiling childhood Skywalker, framed by one of the company’s original, colorful employee badges. The meme progresses Skywalker’s age in two later versions of the badge.
The final badge shows Darth Vader working for “Google,” spelled out in the font of IBM’s logo.
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