Google to Add Conversational AI to Search

Google plans to add conversational artificial intelligence (AI) to its search engine amid a challenge from Microsoft.

Sundar Pichai, CEO of the tech giant, outlined the company’s plans in an interview Thursday (April 6) with The Wall Street Journal (WSJ). He said artificial intelligence would boost Google’s search functions, and waved away the idea that chatbots could threaten the company’s vital search business.

“The opportunity space, if anything, is bigger than before,” Pichai told the WSJ.

While Google has for years developed large language models found in conversational AI programs like ChatGPT (or its own Bard), Pichai said the company hasn’t used it to guide its search engine, until now.

“Will people be able to ask questions to Google and engage with LLMs in the context of search? Absolutely,” Pichai said.

The report notes that Pichai is dealing with the twin challenges of investors pressuring him to cut costs — the company earlier this year announced it was cutting 12,000 jobs — as well as Microsoft’s use of ChatGPT in its Bing search engine.

As PYMNTS noted recently, this battle finds Microsoft trying to crash the internet search space that its larger rival has ruled over for 20 years.

“How that story ends is anyone’s guess, although few believe Microsoft can compete with Google’s datasets, payments tools and search dominance,” PYMNTS wrote.

That hasn’t prevented Microsoft from trying. It invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019 and became that company’s cloud computing partner. Reports earlier this year found Microsoft inking a new deal with OpenAI worth $10 billion over as many years.

Google, meanwhile, suffered a costly mistake with the initial public launch of Bard earlier this year, as a mistake during a demonstration caused parent company Alphabet to lose $100 billion of its market cap.

In the background of this rivalry are calls by critics of AI to suspend future development of the technology. But as PYMNTS wrote Wednesday (April 5), these calls could ultimately backfire.

“So what would happen if legitimate researchers and their investors really did pause AI development?” the report asked. “The most likely scenario is one where illegitimate researchers and profit-chasing companies fill the gap and advance AI’s velocity for their own gain, with few guardrails around data set integrity.”

As PYMNTS’ Karen Webster wrote earlier this year, AI’s largest potential gift is a new knowledge base needed to outfit the workforce — any worker in any sector — with the tools to provide a consistent, high-quality level of service, quickly and at scale.