In 2016, Sundar Pichai told his employees that Google was going to be an “AI-first company.” At the time, the statement struck some as a nonevent and others as premature: the investments in and attention to artificial intelligence seemed out of step with the company’s core business of internet search and advertising. Then in 2022, when OpenAI launched a splashy chatbot and Anthropic soon followed, Google again looked out of step. The early results of Pichai’s effort to catch up were, let’s be honest, not pretty. This January, Alphabet , Google’s parent company, hit a $4 trillion market capitalization, becoming only the fourth company in history to do so. Gemini, Google’s main AI product, now accounts for around a quarter of AI traffic worldwide, up from nearly 6% at the start of 2025. What once looked like a misadventure turned out to be a pivotal chapter in the story Pichai began telling a decade earlier.…