In a recent interview in downtown San Francisco, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai addressed growing concerns that artificial intelligence could render half of the company’s 180,000-person workforce obsolete. Rather than anticipating mass redundancies, Pichai emphasized ongoing and sustained expansion, particularly in engineering roles, well into the next year.
“AI is enhancing productivity,” Pichai explained, describing it as an accelerator rather than a disruptor of employment. It frees engineers from repetitive tasks, enabling them to concentrate on more significant, creative projects. According to Pichai, this heightened efficiency naturally drives new product development and, in turn, creates further demand for employees.
Alphabet’s history of layoffs has sparked speculation about AI’s impact. This year, targeted reductions have been more modest compared to previous large-scale cuts. Earlier in 2025, less than one hundred positions were eliminated from Google’s cloud division, followed by several hundred more layoffs in the platforms and devices group. In contrast, the company experienced a notably heavier toll in both 2024 and 2023, cutting approximately one thousand employees last year and 12,000 the year before.
Looking ahead, Pichai pointed to Alphabet’s promising ventures, such as Waymo’s autonomous vehicles, advances in quantum computing, and particularly YouTube’s remarkable growth trajectory. Highlighting YouTube’s outsized success in India alone, Pichai noted its scale of 100 million channels, including roughly 15,000 channels each commanding over one million subscribers as proof of abundant opportunities for innovation and workforce growth.
Though confident in the technology’s impact, Pichai also acknowledged legitimate fears surrounding AI’s potential displacement of white-collar roles, referencing recent warnings from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei about significant job losses. “I respect those views,” he stated, emphasizing the importance of debating these implications openly.
When questioned about the future of artificial general intelligence (AGI)—that is, AI capable of equaling human intelligence across all tasks—Pichai remained cautiously optimistic. “We’re making meaningful advances in our current approaches, alongside some promising, newer experiments,” he said. Still, he tempered his optimism by suggesting that technology development often encounters plateaus. “Are we on a direct, unstoppable path to AGI?” he reflected, “I don’t believe anyone can say that with absolute confidence today.”
