Google has its own internal AI tools to help engineers be more productive.
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Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the company is tracking how AI makes its engineers more productive.
During the "Lex Fridman Podcast," Pichai estimated a 10% increase in engineering capacity.
Separately, Google and Microsoft have publicly shared how much of their code is being generated by AI.
Google is tracking how AI is making its engineers more productive β and has developed a specific way to measure it.
Speaking on an episode of the "Lex Fridman Podcast" that aired last week, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that the company was looking closely at how artificial intelligence was boosting productivity among its software developers.
"The most important metric, and we carefully measure it, is how much has our engineering velocity increased as a company due to AI?" he said. The company estimates that it's so far seen a 10% boost, Pichai said.
A Google spokesperson clarified to Business Insider that the company tracks this by measuring the increase in engineering capacity created, in hours per week, from the use of AI-powered tools.
Put simply, it's a measurement of how much extra time engineers are getting back thanks to AI.
Whether Google expects that 10% number to keep increasing, Pichai didn't say. However, he said he expects agentic capabilities β where AI can take actions and make decisions more autonomously β will unlock the "next big wave".
Google has its own internal tools to help engineers code. Last year, the company launched an internal coding copilot named "Goose," trained on 25 years of Google's technical history, Business Insider previously reported.
While AI Pichai said during the podcast that Google plans to hire more engineers next year. "The opportunity space of what we can do is expanding too," he said, adding that he hopes AI removes some of the grunt work and frees up time for more enjoyable aspects of engineering.
Separately, the company is tracking the amount of code that is being generated by AI within Google's walls β a number that is apparently increasing.
Google isn't the only one. Speaking at London Tech Week on Monday, Microsoft UK CEO Darren Hardman said its GitHub Copilot coding assistant is now writing 40% of code at the company, "enabling us to launch more products in the last 12 months than we did in the previous three years."
He added: "It isn't just about speed."
In April, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg predicted AI could handle half of Meta's developer work within a year.
For HR software company Lattice, the answer is to embrace it now and get ahead.
Last month, the company announced it was launching an AI agent designed to help HR teams. The agent would effectively give employees a digital copilot to answer questions about payroll, benefits, and other things they might usually message a human about.
On Tuesday, Lattice announced it's rolling out more features to transform these tools from simple chatbots into more proactive assistants.
They'll sit in on 1:1 meetings with your manager. They'll nudge you if they think an employee is disengaged and at risk of leaving the company. They'll let you practice difficult questions before having them with other employees.
Notably, Lattice is applying those same techniques to other business departments beyond HR, with what it's calling an "agent platform." Lattice CEO Sarah Franklin told Business Insider that IT and finance are two areas where these agents could be most helpful.
"I have an executive assistant as the CEO of a company, but my regular line engineer does not have an executive assistant," said Franklin. Lattice's proposal is: what if they did?
AI agents are a big theme in the corporate world right now. As the underlying AI models continue to improve rapidly, generative AI tools that can actually carry out helpful tasks and act more proactively are becoming more of a reality. But Franklin says many companies are struggling to make that leap.
"A lot of people are stuck at the starting line of, 'how do I get this going for my employees, rather than just having a ChatGPT window?'" she said.
Franklin believes using AI to replace repetitive daily manual tasks, such as answering employee questions about payroll or health insurance plans, will free employees up for more "strategic" thinking.
She doesn't deny that some companies will look to use these AI tools to replace some humans, but she also said that's not what Lattice is trying to do. Instead, she sees the ability to offload menial tasks to AI as a way to make employees more productive and useful.
"We're not able to have people focused on the things that are really important because they're too busy doing the stuff that is logistical and not strategic," she said.
Franklin says there will always be a human in the loop and that Lattice's AI agents won't act on their "proactive" recommendations, such as contacting an employee who has missed a deadline, without a warm body giving the OK. Some companies that were bullish on AI, such as Klarna, have about-turned in recent months after discovering that taking humans out of the loop backfired.
It's a sign of just how unchartered these waters are. Lattice itself knows: jump back 10 months, and the company found itself in a media storm after announcing a new tool to let companies onboard AI "employees" and even give them official employment records.
It didn't go over well, and Lattice later walked back the release, but Franklin still believes the idea at heart was correct.
"We need to treat them as employees that aren't ghosts," she told BI. That means holding AI agents to the same standards as human employees when it comes to security, compliance, and performance, she added, "so we have a deep understanding of how these entities are behaving."
This, she said, will be important to preventing AI from just taking human jobs outright. It's an optimistic take, and it might prove to be correct. But there's also fear right now that AI agents will soon be good enough to wipe out many white-collar jobs. In some cases, they are already doing so.
"People have fear, uncertainty, doubt β this is why the time is now where we must all go through this change management, know how to be proficient, fluent, and elevated with AI so we're not replaceable," said Franklin.
"We prevent this by being proactive, by seeing the future and getting to it first."
Google stock tumbled after Apple senior vice president Eddy Cue said Safari searches had dropped.
A filing reveals another reason Google watchers worry about search: slowed growth in paid clicks.
Some analysts are split over whether Google's Search empire is under threat.
Apple senior vice president of services Eddy Cue set alarm bells ringing on Wednesday after dropping a bombshell at Google's antitrust trial: Google searches through Safari dropped in April for the first time ever.
While his comments triggered a frenzied sell-off in Google stock, it might not be the only reason the company's watchers should be concerned about Google's ability to keep full control over the search market.
A little-noticed number in Google's latest financial disclosure may be the realest sign yet that investors have reason to worry.
After reporting blockbuster Q1 earnings last month, Google revealed in a 10-Q filing with the SEC that paid clicks for the quarter grew 2%, down from 5% growth in the same quarter a year ago. That's the slowest growth rate since the company began reporting the metric.
Paid clicks are exactly what they sound like: people click on ads across Google Search and other services such as Google Play and Gmail. Each click translates to money in Google's pocket.
Why those paid clicks are down, exactly, Google hasn't said.
"It's possible macro played a role, or searches with AI overviews delivered better results, requiring fewer 'paid clicks' to get to conversion," Bernstein analysts wrote in a note published Wednesday. "But mostly, it's a worrying KPI."
The analysts said they believe the timing of the dip, combined with Cue's comments and surging numbers of ChatGPT and Meta AI users, suggests that Google's control of the search market may be lower than previously believed.
"Combined, we estimate Google's search share is closer to 65-70% vs. the 90% we often hear," they wrote.
Google declined to comment.
Google's slice of pie
Google insists that it's seeing more searches than ever.
Since the 2000s, the company has managed to harvest vast amounts of searches by paying Apple a fee to make its search engine the default on Apple's Safari web browser. As recently as 2022, Google had paid Apple at least $20 billion βΒ a massive fee that signals how much value Google sees in having Apple users turn to its search engine for all their queries.
It maintains that this partnership continues to drive growth in searches. Cue's comments were provocative enough to prompt the search giant to issue a public statement stating that it continues to see "overall query growth" in Search, including an increase in total queries coming from Apple.
There's little doubt among industry watchers that the overall search pie is growing βΒ though figures from research firm Statcounter suggest Google's control of the global search has fallen slightly. The big question is whether Google's slice of that pie is shrinking relative to rivals.
According to Statcounter, Google's share of global search traffic fell to 89.71% in March 2025, down from about 91% in March 2024 and about 93% in March 2023.
Meanwhile, competing search products are growing. In April, OpenAI said that around 10% of the world uses ChatGPT, which would be at least 800 million users. Meta also said that about 1 billion people use AI across its various products.
The search market expands with AI as chatbots and generative tools expand the definition of search. Google could reap the rewards here, though this also creates an opening for competitors charging as fast as possible to stay ahead of the search giant.
Bernstein analysts estimated that generative AI queries that run through chatbots such as ChatGPT are reaching volumes close to 15% of the queries processed by Google and other traditional search engines.
Analysts are split
Other analysts are divided on just how much of a threat Google's search business faces.
For instance, longtime Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo took to X on Wednesday to explain why he felt it was a mistake to think generative AI would not affect Google's advertising business.
He said that despite the "continued growth of Google's advertising business," the company hasn't had much competition yet.
"GenAI service providers have not launched advertising businesses, so Google Ads remains the best choice for online advertisers," Kuo wrote.
The following statement by Appleβs senior vice president of services, Eddy Cue, implies that Google search and advertising business are facing potential threats from generative AI (GenAI): Cue noted that searches on Safari dipped for the first time last month, which he attributedβ¦
β ιζι€ (Ming-Chi Kuo) (@mingchikuo) May 7, 2025
Kuo likened Google's situation to the one Yahoo faced during the 2000s. The company's advertising business, launched in 1995, only started declining in 2008, despite newfound competition from Google's AdWords business arriving back in 2000.
Analysts at investment bank Jefferies have a different view. In a research note on Wednesday, the analysts had a particular word to describe the roughly $155 billion sell-off in Google's stock following Cue's comments: "overblown."
While they acknowledged that Google's AI-powered "Overviews" feature may act as a headwind right now as it is resulting in "fewer searches," they said Google will "be able to ramp monetization" of its AI summary feature over the long run.
They also don't see a scenario where Apple shifts away from Google and causes as much harm as investors might think.
"While Safari is significant, it does not represent the entirety of search activity; iOS accounts for 18% of operating systems, and Safari holds 17% of the browser market share compared to Chrome's 66%," the analysts wrote.
Jerry Dischler, president of cloud applications at Google.
Google
Google Cloud executive Jerry Dischler told staff on Monday he plans to leave the company.
Dischler was leading cloud applications at Google.
Dischler previously ran Google's powerful ads business and spent nearly 20 years at the company.
Jerry Dischler, a Google veteran who spent several years steering the company's crucial advertising business, plans to depart Google.
Dischler, who has been at Google for almost 20 years, announced his departure in a memo to staff on Monday, which was seen by Business Insider. A Google spokesperson confirmed the departure.
Dischler was most recently president of cloud applications, overseeing Google's Workspace office software product and integrating AI tools into customers' businesses. He joined Google in 2005 and worked on technology that eventually became Google Pay. He later ran Google's entire ads operations.
"The most difficult aspect of my decision was stepping away from the incredible opportunity we have before us," he wrote in the email, adding that he did so with "immense confidence" in the teams.
Dischler's exit marks another notable departure for the teams working on Google Workspace, a critical product for Google in generative AI that competes with Microsoft's productivity tools.
Aparna Pappu, former vice president and general manager of Google Workspace, announced late last year she would step down and hand over the reins to Dischler.
In his departing note, Dischler wrote that senior managers on Workspace will report to Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian, effective May 9, until a new leader is named.
Dischler wrote that it was time for him "to explore something new," although he did not say if he was leaving for a new opportunity.
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