How Sundar Pichai is rethinking Google for the AI era

Decoder with Nilay Patel

Vox Media Podcast Network

Business, Technology

4.2 • 3.4K Ratings

🗓️ 26 May 2026

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Connecting with Google CEO Sundar Pichai at I/O every year is one of my favorite Decoder traditions. This was our fifth year doing it, and there’s always a whole slew of new things to talk about. This year, in addition to the news, we talked about Google Zero; picking fights with YouTube creators and publishers; and what being at “the foothills of the singularity" even means. Read the full interview transcript on The Verge. Links: If Google can’t make AI agents useful, maybe no one can | The Verge The future of Google is a search box that does everything | The Verge Large language mistake | The Verge You can now remix other people’s YouTube Shorts with AI | The Verge Condé Nast calls Google Zero | The Verge Demis Hassabis said this may be the ‘foothills of the singularity’ | The Verge Google I/O 2026: All the news and announcements | The Verge Subscribe to The Verge to access the ad-free version of Decoder! Credits: Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Decoder is produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt. This episode was edited by Kabir Chopra. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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1:07.9	Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil I Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today, I'm talking with Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai. In a conversation, we recorded just after the Google I-O developer conference. This is the fifth year, Sundar and I have sat down after I-O, and it's become one of my favorite Decoder traditions. There's always a lot of news that I owe, and this year was no exception. Google has powerful new Gemini models.
1:30.8	It's putting AI agents and everything, and it's making huge changes to search on both the web and YouTube that will once again reshape the information ecosystem. That's a lot to talk about, and Sundar and I got into all of it. But I also realized that it's been a long time
1:44.2	since I'd asked Sundar the decoder questions about structure and decision making. So I started there.
1:49.2	You'll hear Sundar say he realized he needed to rethink how Google worked a few years ago in response
1:54.5	to chat GPT. And he made a lot of executive changes and big decisions to get the company in a more
	...

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