Elizabeth Reid has over the past year led Google’s push to reinvent its core product: search. About a year ago her team launched the company’s biggest revamp in years with AI Overviews, in which generative artificial intelligence models summarise search results.
The feature began tentatively, with the AI summaries prompting ridicule when they advised users that eating rocks can be healthy and told others to glue cheese to pizza. Since then, Reid says, the company has worked to balance accuracy and usefulness, and is seeing people change the way they seek information online.
In this conversation with the Financial Times’ AI correspondent Melissa Heikkilä, Reid talks about the future of AI-powered search and how it is changing the business model of the internet.