Google execs say employees have to ‘be more AI-savvy’ as competition ramps up

Google executives are pushing employees to act with more urgency in their use of artificial intelligence as the company looks for ways to cut costs.

That was the message at an all-hands meeting last week, featuring CEO Sundar Pichai and Brian Saluzzo, who runs the teams building the technical foundation for Google’s flagship products.

“Anytime you go through a period of extraordinary investment, you respond by adding a lot of headcount, right?” Pichai said, according to audio obtained by CNBC. “But in this AI moment, I think we have to accomplish more by taking advantage of this transition to drive higher productivity.”

In its earnings report last week, Alphabet said it plans to spend $85 billion on capital expenditures in 2025, up from the $75 billion it was targeting earlier in the year. It’s a theme that’s resonating across technology, where internet giants are racing to build costly data centers to run big AI models and workloads while simultaneously cutting expenses elsewhere.

“We are competing with other companies in the world,” Pichai said at the meeting. “There will be companies which will become more efficient through this moment in terms of employee productivity, which is why I think it’s important to focus on that.”

In June, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said the company’s corporate workforce will shrink in the coming years as it adopts more generative AI tools and agents. In an email to employees, Jassy wrote that employees should learn how to use AI tools and experiment and figure out “how to get more done with scrappier teams.”

Microsoft‘s president overseeing developer tools, Julia Liuson, told employees in June that “using AI is no longer optional.” Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke said in April there’s a “fundamental expectation” that employees are using AI in their day-to-day work and, before asking “for more headcount and resources, teams must demonstrate why they cannot get what they want done using AI.”

While Alphabet’s headcount has been ticking up in recent quarters, it’s still below the peak from 2023, when the company had close to 191,000 full-time employees. The number was just over 187,000 at the end of June, according to Alphabet’s quarterly financial filing last week. Google eliminated about 6% of its workforce in early 2023 and has implemented cuts in various groups since then, offering buyouts to employees since the beginning of the year.

“We are going to be going through a period of much higher investment and I think we have to be frugal with our resources, and I would strive to be more productive and efficient as a company,” Pichai said, adding that he’s “very optimistic” about how Google is doing.

Google declined to comment on the remarks.

At the meeting, Saluzzo highlighted a number of tools the company is building for software engineers, or SWEs, to help “everybody at Google be more AI-savvy.”

“We feel the urgency to really quickly and urgently get AI into more of the coding workflows to address top needs so you see a much more rapid increase in velocity,” Saluzzo said. 

Saluzzo said Google has a portfolio of AI products available to employees “so folks can go faster.” He mentioned an internal site called “AI Savvy Google” which has courses, toolkits and learning sessions, including some for individual product areas.

Google’s engineering education team, which develops courses for internal and external use, partnered with DeepMind on a training called “Building with Gemini” that the company will start promoting soon, Saluzzo said. He also referenced a new internal AI coding tool called Cider that helps software engineers with various aspects of the development process.

Since May, when the company first introduced Cider, 50% of users tap the service on a weekly basis, Saluzzo said. Regarding Google’s internal AI tools, Saluzzo said that employees should “expect them to continuously get better” and that “they’ll become a pretty integral part of most SWE work.”

Google made a big splash in the AI coding market earlier this month, snapping up key execs at high-profile startup Windsurf as part of a $2.4 billion deal. Windsurf co-founder and CEO Varun Mohan is joining Google, along with other senior research and development employees.

Pichai referenced the “acquiring” of Mohan and said at the meeting, about Windsurf’s founding team and engineers, “I think they will end up helping a lot in this area as well.”

WATCH: Google snatches Windsurf CEO