I just got back from Google I/O and I want to share my thought about what I think is working and what isn't with Google's AI strategy.
What's working is Google has massive scale. The Gemini app now has 900 million monthly users, second only to ChatGPT, and Google is also shipping a ton of new products.
But here's the issue:
There are too many AI products
Look at all the AI products that Google launched at I/O. At first glance, this seems like a flex, but I think there's a downside. Google is launching so many AI products that users don't know where to start anymore:
Between Gemini, AI Studio, Antigravity, Spark, Flow, Stitch, Pomelli, and a dozen other names, it's getting really confusing for consumers and enterprises to know which product to use for what.
There are 3 AI races that matter
Instead of launching everything everywhere, I think Google should focus on winning the three AI races that actually matter:
The race to evolve chat into a personal agent
The race to build a super app for coding + knowledge work
The race to expand beyond text to multimodal
Let's walk through each one.
Race 1: Evolving chat into a personal agent