Even Google’s CEO needs help keeping up with Google.
On the Sources podcast released Wednesday, Sundar Pichai described to host Alex Heath how he delegates some of the information-gathering that comes with running the tech giant.
“It could easily take me an hour a day to kind of catch up, what’s happened in the last 24 hours, right?” Pichai said. “But now I have agents running which summarize and bring that information to me. I can still go deeper, and I do so often.”
Pichai said that his AI agents give him a way to “understand the model development arc,” figure out how Google’s computing resources are being used, and follow threads spread across numerous internal chat groups without having to read through every conversation himself.
“Similarly, there are agents with telemetry into our compute usage by product area, efficiency, utilization, and giving me inputs and insights, you know,” Pichai added. “I think it’s made all of us, you know, be better at what we do.”
That doesn’t mean Pichai has handed over the important calls to AI. He said humans — including himself — remain directly involved in consequential decisions about allocating computing resources.
Managing agents is becoming a skill in its own right, giving some workers a new set of headaches, from checking the bots’ output to preventing them from duplicating work or straying beyond their assignments. Business Insider previously reported that the need to manage agents is making everyone a boss without higher pay.
Delegating to bots doesn’t necessarily make work easier, either. A Cisco engineering director who manages more than 10 agents told Business Insider that overseeing them involves more task switching and can make work feel more intense without shortening his days.
For the Google CEO, however, continuous work is a plus.
“So because your agents, they’re running in the cloud, they’re running 24/7, they have your context, and so they can pick up things where you left off,” Pichai said. “It’s a continuum there. By the time it’s doing that, you would be applying yourself to the next problem and so on.”
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