🟢 From drug discovery to virtual try-on shopping, what is Google telling us about AI?
Google’s I/O 2025 was brilliant, busy, and borderline unfocused. It might be a pivotal moment in its evolution, not because of a singular breakthrough, but because it exposes the reality of navigating this AI moment for big tech and the rest of the industry. Let's unpack this.
Too many rabbits?
I’ve long emphasized that large incumbents often fall into the trap of "strategic dispersion"—a loss of clarity when trying to out-innovate fast-moving challengers. Not to mention the infamous innovator's dilemma, which ensures that major players often succumb to their past success, unable to escape from it. The latest Google I/O event offers a masterclass in this dynamic.
With launches spanning medical research, app design, video generation, real-time translation, interface design, and shopping assistants, the first risk is not lack of innovation but explosive dispersion and utter erosion of strategic focus.
When Google talks AI, it seems now that 'search', the cornerstone of Google’s business and the foundation for its ad empire, is increasingly presented not as a core value driver but just another touchpoint for future businesses. It might be so, but for now, this is dangerously close to undermining the trust-based utility that built Google’s dominance. When innovation becomes more about showing off all that you can instead of solving clear user pain points, brand coherence suffers.
