Confident of keeping momentum going in 2025: Sundar Pichai to Googlers in New Year mail

Google CEO Sundar Pichai

As the battle for supremacy in artificial intelligence (AI) technology heats up among tech giants, Google chief executive Sundar Pichai expressed confidence in the company's ability to maintain its momentum into 2025.

"As we start the year, I have been reviewing demos for the products and features we’re rolling out in the next few months. The progress is amazing, and I’m confident we will keep the momentum going in 2025" Pichai said in an email to Google employees on January 8, a copy of which has been viewed by Moneycontrol.

In December, Google unveiled a flurry of new product launches and feature enhancements across its services, spanning Search, YouTube, Cloud, Android, and Pixel among others.

This includes a new version of its flagship AI model, Gemini 2.0, aimed at powering the next generation of virtual agents; an experimental reasoning model Gemini Flash Thinking; video generation model Veo 2; a new quantum chip called Willow; and an enterprise version of its viral AI note-taking and research app NotebookLM.

Google also announced Android XR, a mixed-reality operating system for headsets and smart glasses with built-in Gemini that is expected to debut in 2025 with Samsung's Project Moohan headset.

"The foundation to all of this is our technical and AI leadership, made possible by our full stack approach, and people were inspired by what we built," Pichai said.

The Google chief, however, noted that "As exciting as the opportunity is ahead of us - it’s also going to be a lot of work and there’s lots to do, I hope you’re ready for that too"

In the email, he also emphasised on the “urgency of this moment, how rapidly technology is evolving, and our opportunity to reimagine our products and processes for a new era.”

Pichai's comments come after a challenging 2024 for the company, where it faced heightened rivalry from tech giants such as Microsoft and Facebook parent Meta in a rapidly evolving sector.

The company's flagship search business encountered its biggest challenge in over a decade, amid renewed competition from firms such as OpenAI and Perplexity, as well as an ongoing shift in consumer behaviour.

To address these challenges, Google launched an AI-powered search experience in early 2024, bolstering it with new features such as the ability for users to ask complex questions and search using audio and video.

In December, the company also showed off new research prototypes such as its futuristic universal AI assistant Project Astra; Project Mariner, an early prototype capable of taking actions in Chrome as an experimental extension; and Jules, an experimental AI-powered code agent.