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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: Google CEO Sundar Pichai On The Future Of AI And Human Connection [Watch (HLS stream): Google CEO Sundar Pichai On The Future Of AI And Human Connection](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/WgMQ5iLd.m3u8) (6:43)  _Published 2026-05-04_ --- May 15, 2026 7:25 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [Bill Gates Guest-Edits Time Magazine](/video/FywCjMzE/) ### Bill Gates Guest-Edits Time Magazine [Bill Gates on Healthcare](/video/YxMNctaW/) ### Bill Gates on Healthcare [TIME's Nancy Gibbs Interviews Ivanka Trump](/video/fBJ0vdQO/) ### TIME's Nancy Gibbs Interviews Ivanka Trump --- ## Transcript Sometimes I'm about to go meet another CEO. Sometimes while walking to the meeting, I'll ask Gemini, tell me what is something that could really be on his or her mind. And I get really insightful things and which makes for a more human connection because that's actually what they are worried about. Google CEO Sundar Pichai isn't nearly as well known as other tech CEOs, but Google is playing a massively important role in exposing everyday people to AI tools, and has the resources and talent to eventually win the AI race. On April 8th, I went to Google headquarters to talk to Pichai about how AI is reshaping decision making, the rise of AI assistants, and what it will take to build this technology responsibly. You can read the rest of my interview with Pichai in Time magazine. In some ways, we've had a mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. I view AI as the most profound way we can make progress against that mission. It's going to be such a powerful enabler pretty much across all walks of your life. And so we want to make sure we translate that into concrete, tangible benefits for billions of people internally. I'm able to use our tools and query Gemini to get extraordinarily important information. I need to make decisions. In the past, I would suddenly, you know, I would probably wait for a couple days to get the decision. Now it's a command away. It's a prompt away. Right. And, uh, I enjoyed, uh, coding. Uh, I've enjoyed building things. So I think it's really making me more productive in ways I couldn't have imagined before. I think it's really going to help with decision making by bringing the right information, as well as being a, an assistant to you as you're making these decisions. Since the beginning of 2026, AI agents like Opencola have gained huge adoption with people outsourcing many parts of their lives to machines. I asked Pichai about how agents fit into Google's future. People are trying to schedule calendar planned dinners, uh, throw parties, make it to their kids appointments. You know, your life has a lot of tasks. Uh, And so literally, where can we do more of that work and make your life ten, 20, 30, 40% better, easier so that you can use the time for things that matter to you. Right. And, and that's, that's why I think the personal notion of personalized agents helping you across many, many things. Can it automatically look at my inbox and tell, here are the three emails I need to respond to. And here are suggested responses, which I can edit, maybe. And so those are simple examples to more complex workflows, right? Always monitor what's happening in the world regarding this topic, summarize it and bring it to me in a digestible way. You know, these are all examples of and there are infinite possibilities, people working on what we've been calling agentic AI for the past couple of years. Uh, you know, internally, a lot of us are using these powerful agents. I think open cloud kind of brought it to the hands of many people in a tangible way where people could kind of understand the change that's about to come. So I think it was very important for that moment to happen. But I do think the era of personalized agents, very capable agents, which are helping you with many, many things that will play out for everyone. And so that's the exciting phase ahead in general, in terms of how they are adopting the tools, we generally find that people are engaging pretty actively. Last year, we launched this thing called nano banana, which allowed people to create images with prompts. We literally had, you know, over a billion images created just in a matter of days. People around the world engaging with expressing their creativity. So I see people engaging with the technology, regardless of I think people have rightfully a sense of optimism, a sense of anxiety about the whole technology space as a whole. But in terms of their day to day usage, I think they are engaging. If they get their chance, they engaging pretty heavily with these tools. AI has an extremely low approval rating in America right now. I asked Pichai to respond to criticism that Google is building tools people don't want. I think there are. There are a set of larger policy ideas. You know, I view our role as engaging with policy makers and regulators to help them think through the areas which I think are much more important in the near term. Where we are engaged very closely is how do we responsibly grow and meet our energy needs in a sustainable way? Things like permitting reform, investing in new types of energy. How do you manage the cyber security risks that are emerging? How do you invest in education and reskilling the workforce? I think those how do you handle deep fakes? How do we make sure we can all understand what reality is to us? Those have felt like the more immediate efforts. And we haven't by any means addressed all of those areas. So I think we have focused more as a company on engaging as well as contributing in those areas. So what would you say to some people who are scared of the idea of big tech controlling potentially the most powerful technology ever created? Look, I think there are many, many companies pursuing this, even just through this AI movement. There are new companies which are what you would probably call big tech, which didn't exist three years ago. I've never seen a space be more dynamic. There are a variety of players, big and small, working on this technology. There is open source. We just released Gemma four, which is a powerful open source model. It's fully open source available for anyone to use. I do think over time governments will be involved given the power of this technology. This is the kind of technology which which it's not. It's unlike anything before. There is no way one company or a few companies are going to do it detached from the rest of society. So I think, you know, we'll all have to build it and usher this next phase in a responsible way. Like many of his peers paving the way in, AI Pichai told me he expects this new technology will need unprecedented frameworks, governance and guardrails. 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