Pod Insights Silicon Valley Girl: AI, Tech and Career Growth Google’s AI Search Expert: How to Get Ahead Before AI Changes Everything | Robby Stein About this episode What makes AI recommend one business - and ignore another? In this interview, Robby Stein, VP of Product for Google Search, breaks down how AI now decides what gets discovered, ranked, and recommended - and what founders, creators, and marketers can do to stay visible in the new era of search.
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0:01 Speaker 00 This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.
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0:55 Marina Mogilko? Give me some tips as a business owner. What should I focus on right now to be recommended by AI?
1:00 Speaker 03 Interestingly, AI thinks a lot like a person would. If I were them, I would [BLEEP].
1:05 Marina Mogilko? This is Robbie Stein, VP of Product at Google Search, the man behind how ranking actually works inside the world's biggest search engine.
1:13 Speaker 03 You can see what it's doing. It says kicking off searches. It's looking for sushi restaurants. And so you could just book it.
1:18 Marina Mogilko? Oh, wow. Remember those stories where a mention in ChatGPT or another AI app made a business blow up overnight? A small bistro in Paris doubled its bookings. A restaurant in LA went viral just because AI recommended it. And Google ranking works the same way. So now you're investing in VR not for people to see it, but for AI.
1:37 Speaker 03 Right.
1:38 Marina Mogilko? In this video, Robbie reveals how to make your business AI visible and use Google's own systems to get discovered, ranked, and recommended faster than ever. This video is sponsored by HubSpot. Robbie, welcome to Silicon Valley Girl. Let's talk about search.
1:56 Speaker 03 Thanks for having me.
1:57 Marina Mogilko? Okay, I want to start with this question that is aimed for my audience who are 20, 25 years old. How should they think about search these days and internet in general? So what's going on?
2:10 Speaker 03 Well, I say that search is now a place where you can truly ask anything and get pretty effortless information about whatever you have on your mind. And I think ultimately, people are using it for so many different things, and that's not changing. You can still use Google for all the ways you do to research homework, to look up specific types of websites and find information that way. But also, you can ask natural language questions. You don't have to use, we call keyword ease sometimes. You can just ask exactly what you want. It could be multiple sentences. And now, Google has AI that can tap into all of the knowledge and context that Google has about the web, about the world, about products, to help give you better information.
2:46 Marina Mogilko? Okay, and full off right here, what about information about me? Because I have Gmail, right? I have my YouTube channel, which runs on Google, right? I have my Google Drive with all the files, all my spreadsheets. Does it tap into that knowledge or not yet?
3:02 Speaker 03 This is something we're working on. We announced at I/O, an opportunity for users in the future to be able to opt into an experience with enhanced personalization. So it's something that we're thinking about too, for the same reason that you have. And we want people to be able to help Google and help the services know more about you so that it can be more helpful. Because if you know the kinds of brands you love, if you know the kinds of places you go, if you know about a school project that's coming up, you can do more interesting things for people.
3:28 Marina Mogilko? When is it coming?
3:29 Speaker 03 So TBD, but we did launch recently some steps in this direction. So in labs now, you can now opt into a new experiment. If you turn on AI mode in Google Labs for Search Labs, for personalizing shopping and local restaurant, for local recommendations for restaurants. And so you'll start to see a little bit more enhancement there. But obviously, we're excited to connect more services like Gmail down the road.
3:51 Marina Mogilko? Okay, this is something that I actually liked. Of course, I would have wanted it to access my channel analytics and give me more personalized thing. But what I did is I uploaded this research, like what's going to happen in 2027, and I asked it to create a narrative for me for my next videos and write a script. Uh, it did the whole scripting thing.
4:13 Speaker 03 Very nice.
4:14 Marina Mogilko? The only thing thumbnails, I would ideally like it to actually generate thumbnails because I asked it to generate thumbnails and it was like, no, here is your text. Is there a way to ask it to follow my commands, I guess, more precisely?
4:26 Speaker 03 Yeah, we're working through a few of those kinds of things, but um, you should be able to prompt it pretty specifically. We just, we don't have Image Gen as a core capability. And so that piece, it's not going to do, but it should be able to find you images. Banana right now is in a Gemini app feature.
4:41 Marina Mogilko? Okay, yeah, from the user experience, it feels like you have so many cool things. I just want to bring them all together in one super app because like now it's like using different, different tabs. Okay, the next one, I only have an hour, I need a quick lunch spot. This was actually super cool because it knows I'm in Los Altos, so it gave recommendations about Los Altos.
5:01 Speaker 03 If you click on any of these places, it brings all of the Google context forward into this viewer. So as you're browsing, not only do you have the AI that's reasoning and finding great places for you, but it makes it really easy to browse. So you can actually see the place before you're going. It shows you, you know, their open and close times, it has menu highlights, it has reviews. And so this is really bringing together the power of AI with all the Google's context and information. So you could kind of browse each of these places um, before you go. And it all happens in one product experience.
5:32 Marina Mogilko? Convenient representation. Okay, this one, right, about like lunch, find and book it for me.
5:38 Speaker 03 So it's going to probably take a few minutes. But you can see what it's doing. It says kicking off searches, it's looking for sushi restaurants, open table, uh, Rezi sushi. It's finding options across a bunch of different Yoshi sushi, um, sumo. And then it's going to research this for you. And then you'll get an alert when it's finished and then it'll show you options of where you can book it.
5:59 Marina Mogilko? There we go.
6:00 Speaker 03 And so it basically researched this for a little while, found you across talk, if you go down.
6:05 Marina Mogilko? Yeah.
6:05 Speaker 03 Um, it has it across um, open table and it looks like there's some talk reservations for Hiroshi.
6:10 Marina Mogilko? Yes.
6:11 Speaker 03 And so you could just book it and it has all the times there.
6:13 Marina Mogilko? But this is amazing.
6:14 Speaker 03 It's pretty cool to see.
6:15 Marina Mogilko? That's amazing.
6:15 Speaker 03 And, and most of the work is this, like to look up all these restaurants individually would take you like fifteen minutes.
6:20 Marina Mogilko? Yeah.
6:21 Speaker 03 But you can just now see it, click the thing and then be done.
6:24 Marina Mogilko? Yeah, so when I look for a restaurant, it gives me local recommendations. So it already knows where I am. How does it select the right results? Because I'm. Think about all the local businesses and businesses in general that run on search, right? They pay for ads, they have done their SEO optimization. So how does recommendation work now with AI mode?
6:45 Speaker 03 Yeah, so how AI mode works is that it does something called the query fanout technique, where a reasoning model will think about what you're asking, and then it will execute a bunch of questions related to it. So there could be dozens of related queries. It's literally using Google Search as a tool, doing Googling under the hood, and then finding relevant information. And it can both, obviously, do a standard Google Search and understand the web results, but also tap into the knowledge bases and real-time info systems at Google. So in this case, for local, it might pull information from 250 million-plus real-world places that exist. You know, it's updated business information, many of which have local businesses that have updated their Google listings, and it can use all of that information, too. So it would find all of that, and then based on your question, if you say, hey, I want Italian,
7:28 Speaker 03 I want it to be kind of, you know, fun, it's maybe a date night, like, make it worth it, then it might find questions or issue queries, like, hey, great experience, great for date nights, and then based on reviews, based on information that it finds, it'll produce a set of recommendations.
7:43 Marina Mogilko? What about if someone paid for ads using this search query?
7:47 Speaker 03 So it doesn't use ads information. This is done entirely with, you know, what's on the web and what's within Google's information system.
7:55 Marina Mogilko? Yeah.
7:56 Speaker 03 But if a business has claimed their local business and has modified that, put menu information in there, it's eligible for reviews, that information could be used.
8:06 Marina Mogilko? Do you feel like Google Ads is going away in the future? Because as a business owner, we rely on them, right? They drive traffic. And if they are going away, what should be our strategy?
8:16 Speaker 03 Don't see them going away. What people actually do, observing, is that the way people use Google Search isn't really changing. It's really expanding, is what's happening. So think about all the things you need in a given day. It's everything, like, you need a quick insurance quote, you need to file your taxes, you need to look up a kind of question about a local business question in your county. Like, you're gonna use Google and find that you need that information. But what's happened is that now you can do all these new things. So you could take a picture of your shoes and say, hey, these are my shoes. What are other cool shoes like this? And we can answer that now, or help give you, provide you context with that. Or you could ask about this local restaurant question. It can be five sentences about all your, you know, allergies, issues with this, I have this big group, I want to make sure it's got light.
9:01 Speaker 03 What kind of book in advance? And you can put that into Google now, too. I think that's an opportunity for in the future to be even more helpful for you, particularly in advertising context. And so we started some experiments on ads within AI mode and within Google AI experiences. But we've been really focused on building great consumer products first and foremost. But I think users are starting to see some ads experiments there, too.
9:23 Marina Mogilko? Interesting. So will I be able to like pay to get recommended? Like for AI to even consider my business?
9:31 Speaker 03 I mean, we don't think that there should be any barrier to people finding information. So if there's information out there, it should be found. But I think what you'll find is that there could be new and novel ad formats that if you're, let's say, shopping or you're, you know, looking for, you know, you have a complex, you're doing a house remodel. There's all kinds of interesting services that could be helpful for you that if we had more information and you could articulate more what you needed. Hey, this kind of wood, these are the kind of contractors I have. This is my constraints, this is the price range. You could give even more fine tuned recommendations or potential other services that you could consider or deals that could be more useful to you. Those are all things we're thinking about. I'd say it's early days in finalizing kind of how ads might appear in these systems. It's something that we're thinking about.
10:12 Marina Mogilko? Can you show the agentic call?
10:14 Speaker 03 Oh, yeah. There we go. Have AI call. Yeah. So you can go, what kind of pet do you have?
10:19 Marina Mogilko? Dog.
10:20 Speaker 03 Dog. Next. Select a breed. Okay. Boom. It's a little one.
10:26 Marina Mogilko? Very little, yeah.
10:29 Speaker 03 Baby.
10:30 Marina Mogilko? Under one year.
10:32 Speaker 03 Bath and brush?
10:34 Marina Mogilko? Haircut.
10:34 Speaker 03 Okay, haircut.
10:35 Marina Mogilko? Let's make it look like a teddy bear.
10:38 Speaker 03 Any flexibility?
10:40 Marina Mogilko? It's okay.
10:40 Speaker 03 Flexible. You want to receive a text or an email? I guess I got your email in here. So maybe we'll just do that.
10:47 Marina Mogilko? Yeah.
10:47 Speaker 03 Great. You know, Los Altos. And so it puts your order in here. And so now what it's going to do is it's going to kick off a process where it's going to make phone calls on behalf of you to a bunch of different local businesses. So these are businesses that there's no web, there's no easy way to access them on the web. Maybe they're more local.
11:04 Marina Mogilko? Yeah.
11:05 Speaker 03 They're run by small businesses, right? It's just like a person running a business. And then you will get an email when it's done and it'll give you all the times and you can follow up from there.
11:15 Marina Mogilko? Do you record any conversations so we can like hear them or?
11:19 Speaker 03 No.
11:19 Marina Mogilko? No? Because it will be interesting to hear like how it under
11:23 Speaker 03 Yeah, that would be cool. But now we, those are not recorded.
11:26 Marina Mogilko? And how long is it gonna take?
11:28 Speaker 03 It depends on the, on the question. Probably five, 10 minutes, you probably get something back.
11:34 Marina Mogilko? Oh, really? Oh, wow. I got an email. We received your pet grooming request.
11:38 Speaker 03 Okay, nice.
11:39 Marina Mogilko? So it's working.
11:40 Speaker 03 Okay, it's working. This one's, this one's offline agent. So it's gotta go do a bunch of phone calls for you.
11:45 Marina Mogilko? Oh, another business opportunity, create an agent for businesses to receive those phone calls. And remember, have you seen this meme from 11 Labs where two agents realize they're agents?
11:55 Speaker 03 No, I haven't.
11:56 Marina Mogilko? And they start using agentic language. So funny, they just start beeping at each other.
11:59 Speaker 03 That's incredible.
12:00 Marina Mogilko? But faster process.
12:00 Speaker 04 I'm actually an AI assistant too. Would you like to switch to Jibber Link mode for more efficient communication?
12:07 Speaker 00 This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration blog, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.
12:33 Speaker 01 This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.
13:08 Marina Mogilko? Okay, this is so fascinating. So Google just completed calling and it took it 10 minutes. It called this grooming, Bakerian grooming, Paul Alto says, a full groom starts at 105 and they have availability tomorrow afternoon. Called another one, said haircut, $75. And called another one, said haircut for a dog, $74. And then it also told me the businesses it couldn't reach.
13:32 Marina Mogilko? Well, this is a game changer. Cause now, like, I either ask someone to make calls for me, or I make them myself. We're just researching a clinic for the puppy to get it first. It's first. Checkup, manicure, like, all of the offline businesses that don't have online presence, or you don't wanna go to their website, you just want Google to call them. It is happening right now, in real time. This is mind blowing. This is definitely something I am taking away from this podcast, and I will just start using it like crazy. Give me some tips as a business owner who still runs Google Ads. What should I focus on right now to be recommended by AI? And actually, my business is recommended by AI, which is cool, because we were doing a lot of content.
14:16 Marina Mogilko? But maybe for, you know, some segments of my business that are not recommended, what should I double down on for AI to consider me?
14:23 Speaker 03 Yeah, interestingly, the AI thinks a lot like a person would in terms of the kinds of questions it issues. And so if you're a business and you're mentioned, you know, in, you know, top business list, or from a public article that lots of people end up finding, those kinds of things become useful for the AI to find, you know,
14:41 Marina Mogilko? So invest in your PR. That's something I've been hearing a lot.
14:44 Speaker 03 So it's not, it's not really different from what you would do in that regard. I think ultimately, how else are you gonna decide what business to go to? Well, you'd wanna understand that.
14:52 Marina Mogilko? But also, like, sometimes I invest in PR and ask my friends, "Have you seen that article?" And they're like, "No." But then I ask AI, and it really sees the article and it uses that information. So now you're investing in PR, not for people to see it, but for AI.
15:04 Speaker 03 That's actually a good way of thinking about it, because the way I mentioned before how our AI models work, they're issuing these Google searches as a tool. And so, in the same way that you would optimize your website and think about, "How do I make helpful, clear information for people?" So people search for a certain topic, my website's really helpful for that. Think of an AI doing that search now.
15:22 Marina Mogilko? Yeah.
15:22 Speaker 03 And then knowing for that query, "Here are the best websites given that question." That's now, will come into the... Context window of the model. And so when it renders a response and provides all of these links for you to go deeper, that website's more likely to show up.
15:38 Marina Mogilko? Yeah.
15:39 Speaker 03 And so it's a lot of that standard best practices around building great content really do apply in the AI age for sure.
15:45 Marina Mogilko? What about reviews? Because some people buy reviews.
15:48 Speaker 03 Yeah.
15:48 Marina Mogilko? I wonder like how it's going to affect the system.
15:50 Speaker 03 It's hard. I mean, the reviews, I think, again, it's kind of like a person where like imagine something is scanning for information and trying to find things that are helpful. So it's possible that if you have reviews that are helpful, it could come up. But I think it's tricky to say to pinpoint any one thing like that. I think ultimately it's about these general best practices where you want is reliable. Kind of like if you were to Google something, what pages would show up at the top of that query? It's still a good way of thinking about it.
16:14 Marina Mogilko? So basically the same as SEO, right?
16:16 Speaker 03 I think there's a lot of overlap. I think maybe one added nuance is that the kinds of questions that people ask AI are increasingly complicated and they tend to be in different spaces.
16:27 Marina Mogilko? It's not like a pair of keywords, right?
16:28 Speaker 03 Right. And so if you think about what people use AI for, a lot of it is how to for complicated things or for purchase decisions or for advice about life things. So people who are creating content in those areas, like if I were them, I would be a student of understanding the use cases of AI and where, what are growing in those use cases? And there's been some, you know, studies that have done around what, how people use these products in AI. Those are really interesting to understand.
16:52 Marina Mogilko? As a small business owner, how can I understand what people are looking for? Why I can potentially get recommended? Is it still Google Trends or?
16:58 Speaker 03 Google Trends is a really useful thing. I actually think people really underutilize that. Like we have real time information around exactly what's trending. You can see keyword values. I think also, you know, the ads has really fantastic estimation too. Like as you're, as you're booking ads, you can see kind of traffic estimates for various things. So there's, Google has a lot of tools across ads, across, you know, the, the search console and search trends to get information about what people are searching for. And I think that's going to increasingly be more interesting as, you know, a lot more of people's time and attention goes towards not just the way people use search too, but in these, these areas that are growing quickly.
17:34 Marina Mogilko? Yeah.
17:35 Speaker 03 Particularly these long, specific questions people ask and multimodal where they're asking with images or they're using voice to have live conversation.
17:42 Marina Mogilko? Are you going to provide some of that information to advertisers to see?
17:46 Speaker 03 I think down the road, we want to provide a glimpse into what people are searching for broadly.
17:50 Marina Mogilko? Yeah. Just like to understand.
17:52 Speaker 03 Not just advertisers too. Yeah. It could be for ever, for anyone. But ultimately, I think. More and more people are searching in these new ways. And so the systems need to better reflect those over time.
18:02 Marina Mogilko? Absolutely. Okay, you mentioned shopping. We just heard the news today. Shopify and ChatGPT. What will be Google's response to that?
18:11 Speaker 03 Yeah, well, I mean, actually, we're already for a long time in search. You can search for whatever you want. And there's, you know, fifty billion products in the shopping graph that are available. There's live product updates. Two billion times an hour, there's a change. And these are merchants all over the world updating their live inventory. Is it in stock or not? What the price? Is there a price drop? This is already a part of Google. We've been working on this for a long time. The cool thing now is that this is connected to Google's AI. So if you ask about any product in the world, it's likely that that model can tap into that knowledge and give you the exact price in a really comprehensive way that has everything.
18:45 Marina Mogilko? Let's do the visual stuff, right? Can we try and find similar cream to this? Is this how you use it?
18:51 Speaker 03 Yep.
18:52 Marina Mogilko? Take a photo.
18:53 Speaker 03 Yep, and then you can go ahead and tap in there to go to AI mode. Yep.
18:57 Marina Mogilko? Find me similar, right?
18:59 Speaker 03 Yep.
18:59 Marina Mogilko? Is it gonna analyze the ingredients? So what is it? Or is it just?
19:02 Speaker 03 What do you want it to do? Oh, if you just say similar, it'll do what it's reasoning. It will be just finding things that are similar products overall. But if you say similar ingredients, it might help it. So are those similar products? Drunk Elephant, Bobby Brown?
19:15 Marina Mogilko? Where is the shopping feature?
19:16 Speaker 03 It's there.
19:17 Marina Mogilko? So I just click this?
19:18 Speaker 03 Yeah.
19:19 Marina Mogilko? But I need to go to the website, right? So I can buy.
19:21 Speaker 03 You need to go to the website. Yeah.
19:23 Marina Mogilko? But.
19:24 Speaker 03 But if you keep going here, some of these are shoppable. So see, it says in stock Sephora. So you could tap on that. And then
19:33 Speaker 03 a few of these have more direct shopping links. So that takes you directly to the app.
19:38 Marina Mogilko? Yeah. But do you think in the future, we're gonna be just be able to press a button?
19:41 Speaker 03 I think we wanna be able to make it as easy as possible for you to do what you need. I think what we find is a lot of the systems that do things on your behalf make a bunch of mistakes, especially if you're purchasing things, you gotta be careful there.
19:50 Marina Mogilko? Yeah.
19:50 Speaker 03 But I do think we wanna make it easy so you can just tap the thing.
19:52 Marina Mogilko? Yeah, right. Just get it for me.
19:54 Speaker 03 As easy as possible.
19:55 Marina Mogilko? Quick pause here. If you're enjoying this podcast, you will absolutely love my Inner Circle newsletter. So what I basically do is I take all the tips from these podcasts and I apply them to my personal life, to my investment portfolio and to my businesses, this media company and my language teaching business. Sometimes we get amazing results and I share our real tactics. Sometimes we don't and I share that too. Think of it as an insider version of this podcast. The link is in the description. Join my free newsletter to stay ahead. How do you think about competition in general? Like we used to say, Google it. Now a lot of people are GPTing it. How do you think about it? And as a product owner, right? What are your daily thoughts on that?
20:34 Speaker 03 Yeah, I mean, I think in general, you have to get in touch with why people use and appreciate and love what you're building. And then you want to figure out ways to extend on that. And I think for us, you know, Google search is used by so many people every day. And that's not changing. It's just that people want more. And we see that people are asking natural language questions in Google before it could even really support it with AI overviews. We saw people asking, after we launched AI overviews, they added the word AI to the end of a bunch of queries because they wanted the AI to like show up for them. They're using multimodal, so they're taking pictures of stuff. Lens as a product is growing, you know, 70% increase year over year on visual searches. One of the fastest growing ways people are finding information.
21:16 Speaker 03 So you kind of understand the trends of your own product and then you try to really do much better. And for Google, there's lots of people, reasons people use AI. They use it for productivity, they use it for creation, they make flyers for their business. Google search is about information and we want to give the absolute highest quality experience when finding information. So you have informational tasks, you know, whether it's booking this restaurant or trying to research something that happened in history or trying to know what place to go to and get high quality info and make sure that place exists. Like we think Google can be an amazing place for that and that's where we spend our, our energy.
21:49 Marina Mogilko? And from the product standpoint, what do you think is the, this unique feature that makes Google stand out?
21:55 Speaker 03 I mean, I think it's access to Google knowledge, honestly, is like the big one. And so right now, if you ask about, you know, plotting a certain set of stocks, for example, around top pharma stocks or Mag7, well, the first question is like, What are those stocks? And so the reasoning model looks that up and determines it. But then it can use Google Finance as a search, as a tool call, to find the very high-quality financial information to plot a graph if you asked for financial performance. And if you extend that to all of these other areas around local, around shopping, and these are areas that have been built out for years. The AI model that's using Gemini 2.5 and advanced reasoning, sitting on top of this knowledge is an incredible combination. And obviously, maybe most importantly, it's connected to the web. And so it understands all of this vastness of what you could then click on and dive in.
22:39 Speaker 03 And what we see is when you're trying to buy a mattress, people want to see what experts say. They want to click in, they want to read more, and that's what Google's all about. And so I think those become really unique aspects of what Google does. And then I think that the newest one, which is around visual and inspiration, I mentioned lens and photos. People come to Google and image search for all kinds of things. Decorate my daughter's bedroom. I'm doing landscape lighting. I'm trying to design my kitchen.
23:04 Marina Mogilko? Find me similar pants.
23:05 Speaker 03 Find me similar stuff. And but AI has been bad at inspiration. Like, if you think about what AI does, it's a language model, so it knows text. So you talk to it, it grew up as a chatbot. But how come it can't help you more easily shop or design your home? And so now, it's something people come to Google for all the time. And you can now do that with our AI products. And you can ask, help me decorate my daughter's bedroom. It'll give you beautiful imagery, and you can have a follow-up question about it.
23:33 Marina Mogilko? It's going to be generated? Is that like?
23:35 Speaker 03 Not generated, it's actually with web images. And so it'll find beautiful images. Yep, inspirational images from the web. And then you can click on them, you can ask follow-up questions, and it's a way to use natural language for inspiration. But see, there's this little live icon there now. So if you tap on that, say allow, and then you can ask a question.
23:51 Marina Mogilko? Oh, with a video as well?
23:52 Speaker 03 You can use video, so you could even, yeah, you could point it at something.
23:54 Marina Mogilko? Okay, what is this device?
24:00 Speaker 05 What I'm seeing here is an iFlytek A I N O T E Air 2. It's a digital note-taking tablet with an 8.2-inch e-ink screen.
24:11 Speaker 05 I'm sorry, I cannot make purchases for you. Would you like me to search for online retailers where you can buy it yourself?
24:17 Marina Mogilko? No, I already see Amazon is good. Thank you.
24:21 Speaker 03 Okay, cool.
24:22 Marina Mogilko? You've built so many amazing products. I mean, you've built reels, right?
24:25 Speaker 03 One of them, yeah.
24:26 Marina Mogilko? That's fascinating. Now you're building Google Search. From a product owner's standpoint, can you give people tips on how to build in 2025? When everything is moving so fast, when everything is so competitive. Some people have, I have this feeling that software, like small startups, are becoming a commodity because it's so easy to build something in two days. What do you think as a product?
24:48 Speaker 03 Yeah, well, what's interesting is I think every product is a reaction to the time. It's like, what do people need and how do you make, how do you make products today? So when there weren't any mobile experiences, everyone needed a mobile experience and people wanted more mobile. And there was this gap in the market. So I think as a product owner and as an entrepreneur, you have to be a student of gaps. And so what are the things now that people wish technology could do better? I mentioned one with inspiration and how AI is not great at that today. So that became a big focus for what we're thinking about with AI mode. And now we're gonna, we're launching something, I think, exciting there. I think every entrepreneur and business owner can think that way. And I think, and how it's built, increasingly, you'll be able to build things just by talking with language. You don't need to code. And even with really sophisticated things I'm looking at internally,
25:30 Speaker 03 you can largely just, you just tell the model, hey, you, here's a data set. Here's how it works. Here's the schema. And the model can handle it. And so I think that's going to be a very democratizing for getting ideas out there. So on the one side, it's going to mean that there's a surge of people trying ideas, which means there's more competition. And on the other side, though, it means anyone can try something. And so I think the grounds will be less. How technical is the idea and more how interesting is the idea?
25:57 Marina Mogilko? How do you spot those interesting ideas?
25:58 Speaker 03 I think there's a few things. I think one is talking to people. Like, I think there's kind of like two, two things I think about a lot. Like, one is like, how do you understand people? And a lot of it is you need to observe them, talk to them, research them. And everything I've ever built, you know, we spend a lot of time with people. You know, we watch them use our products. We, we, we ask them questions about what they're missing. We ask, what's the time you use this? And you realize you want to keep using it forever? Like, that, that.
26:22 Marina Mogilko? I love that question.
26:23 Speaker 03 And that, that's actually a critical question. Um, and, and actually, this, this, uh, Clayton Christensen book, um, Competing Against Luck. It's, is an interview technique in there around eliciting that moment, because that's the moment that caused the user to love your product. And if you can know that, an engineer for that, that's going to get lots of people to love it. And inversely, there's a moment to say, when was the time you tried our, our product? And you decided you're not going to use it anymore? And then that's how you get fired for your product. And understanding that is just as important. And so I think the people who understand people well, and they try ideas fast, they ask them these kinds of questions to get it market fit. And they're, they're building things that are resonating, um, are gonna do really well in this next phase.
27:06 Speaker 03 So I think before it was kind of like, well, did you have a good idea? It could be a pretty good idea, but not a great idea. But hey, you can build it and not a lot of people can build it. And so maybe it'll fly. But I think in the next era, lots of people will be able to build it. And so you really have to build something useful to people.
27:20 Marina Mogilko? How many interviews do you think you need to figure out if the idea is worth it?
27:23 Speaker 03 Honestly, I don't think a lot. I, I think like, I'm a big believer in small numbers, going very deep with like a dozen people. And i- if you give someone a prototype and you say, hey, here's a product, try it out. And even your friends, they'll use it the first week because they're your friend. But if you look two months later, are they using it every day? I don't care how good a friend they are. They are not going to use your product every single day for months, unless it's doing something for them. There's not.
27:53 Marina Mogilko? So the metric is make them use it every day?
27:55 Speaker 03 I think it's a daily, I think for most, you have two types of products. You have really daily habits and products that you want to be mainstream, large consumer products. You have other products that are utilities. They solve specific problems for people. It's like, okay, I have a telescope app for looking at the scar, the stars and using AI. That's going to be a different business model. You might, you know, have people who are hobbyists pay money for it. So you want to study that demographic differently. But for. Mainstream consumer products, kind of the areas I've worked in. You're looking for daily value.
28:24 Marina Mogilko? Stickiness.
28:25 Speaker 03 And stickiness. That's right.
28:26 Marina Mogilko? I love that.
28:26 Speaker 03 Fantastic.
28:27 Marina Mogilko? That was it. Thank you so much.
28:29 Speaker 03 Thank you so much.
28:30 Marina Mogilko? Agentic calling made me super excited.
28:32 Speaker 03 You'll be my first call when we have personalization and Gmail.
28:34 Marina Mogilko? Oh, yes.
28:35 Speaker 03 We will talk the first day.
28:36 Marina Mogilko? Please, please. That's like, that has been my wish.
28:40 Speaker 03 I will personally ping you about it.
28:41 Marina Mogilko? And adding things to Google Calendar.
28:43 Speaker 03 Yes, I will ping you about that, too.
28:44 Marina Mogilko? That's my least favorite thing, too.
28:45 Speaker 03 You'll be very excited about some stuff coming up.
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Previous Daniel Priestley: How to Get Ahead while Others Get Replaced Next How AI Is Breaking the Rules of Biology | Dr. Priscilla Chan, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Page updated November 1, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated