Google CEO Sundar Pichai maintains that AI will not replace workers even as many of his peers in the tech industry appear to believe otherwise.
Pichai, who also leads Google parent Alphabet, said that AI tools will enable engineers to be more productive and help them focus on more impactful work by automating tedious tasks. He made these remarks while speaking at the Bloomberg Tech conference held in San Francisco this week.
This comes amid a raging debate over the impact of AI on jobs that has been re-ignited after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said that the technology would erode half of all entry-level jobs within the next five years. In response to Amodei’s recent comments, Pichai said, “I respect that . . .I think it’s important to voice those concerns and debate them.”
“We’ve made predictions like that for the last 20 years about technology and automation, and it hasn’t quite played out that way,” he added. On whether AI could eventually make half the company’s 1,80,000-person workforce redundant, Pichai said, “I expect we will grow from our current engineering phase even into next year, because it allows us to do more.”
Pichai has previously mentioned that over 30 per cent of Google’s code is AI-generated. However, he continues to refer to AI as an ‘accelerator’ that will drive new product development and create demand for more employees. So far in 2025, Google has laid off around 100 employees from its cloud division. This number is far fewer than when the company cut 12,000 jobs and 1,000 jobs in 2023 and 2024, respectively.
What else did Pichai say?
On the limitations of AI and whether it is possible for the world to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI), an AI system that performs tasks on-par or better than a human, Pichai said, “There’s a lot of forward progress ahead with the paths we are on, not only the set of ideas we are working on today, [but] some of the newer ideas we are experimenting with.”
“I’m very optimistic on seeing a lot of progress. But you know, you’ve always had these technology curves where you may hit a temporary plateau. So are we currently on an absolute path to AGI? I don’t think anyone can say for sure,” he added.
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Pichai was also optimistic about other technologies and innovations such as Alphabet-owned Waymo autonomous vehicles as well as Google’s quantum computing initiatives and YouTube’s explosive growth in countries like India.
