Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai, has indicated that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is already delivering tangible benefits to the company's engineering teams. During a recent discussion with researcher Lex Fridman on a podcast, Pichai stated that AI tools are enhancing the productivity of Google's software engineers by "10 percent."
Google has implemented a system to precisely track the weekly time savings engineers gain from AI assistance. This saved time is then reallocated to more critical tasks, enabling Google to accelerate its overall operational pace. Pichai emphasized that the company is meticulously monitoring these improvements, and initial results clearly demonstrate a positive impact.
Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai, also articulated a vision for AI that extends beyond mere suggestions and code assistance. Google is actively exploring the development and deployment of "AI agents"—tools capable of independently taking actions, making decisions, and managing routine tasks without continuous human intervention. He believes this advancement will herald the next significant breakthrough in how work is accomplished.
This aligns with broader industry trends toward "agentic AI" in 2025, where AI systems are designed to understand limitations, adapt to feedback, and improve autonomously.
Internally, Google utilizes an AI tool named "Goose" to aid its engineers in code generation. This tool is meticulously trained on decades of Google's extensive internal technical data. Thanks to "Goose" and other similar tools, "more than 30 per cent of the new code written at Google is now AI-generated," a notable increase from "25 per cent just a few months ago."
This trend is not unique to Google, with other major tech companies also embracing AI for software development:
Microsoft has reported that AI is now responsible for generating "40 per cent of its code" through GitHub Copilot, a widely adopted AI coding assistant.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, has publicly stated his expectation that AI could handle "half of Meta’s developer work in the near future." Some reports indicate Zuckerberg expects most of the code for Meta's Llama project to be AI-written within "12-18 months."
Despite the increasing automation, Pichai reiterated that human talent remains central to this technological progress. He confirmed that Google plans to hire "more engineers next year," expressing optimism that AI will take over mundane and repetitive duties, thereby allowing human employees to concentrate on more creative and fulfilling aspects of their roles. In a recent interview with Bloomberg in San Francisco, Pichai clarified that Google views AI as a complementary tool that enhances human capabilities, rather than a replacement.
According to Pichai, AI's role is to enhance efficiency by handling time-consuming and repetitive tasks, leading to increased productivity that enables the company to operate faster and develop more. "I expect we will grow from our current engineering phase even into next year, because it allows us to do more," he stated. He characterized AI as an "accelerator," a means to amplify human potential.
However, Pichai also acknowledged the ongoing concerns regarding job displacement, particularly following a recent warning from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. Amodei has cautioned that AI "could replace a large portion of entry-level white-collar roles in the coming years." While not dismissing these concerns, Pichai stressed the critical need for the industry to engage in transparent discussions about the broader societal impact of AI on employment. Amodei's more recent warnings in May and June 2025 suggest that AI could eliminate "50 per cent of entry-level white-collar jobs within five years" and potentially drive unemployment to "20 per cent by 2030."