Google CEO Sundar Pichai says artificial intelligence is helping the company’s engineers work faster and smarter. Speaking on the “Lex Fridman Podcast,” Pichai shared that Google’s engineers are now about 10% more productive thanks to AI.
Pichai explained that Google tracks this by measuring how much extra time engineers save each week using AI-powered tools. He called it a key sign of how AI is changing the way Google works.
One of the AI tools helping Google’s teams is called Goose, an internal coding assistant trained on over 25 years of Google’s technical history. With Goose, developers can write code faster, letting them focus on harder, creative tasks.
Pichai said the next step is what he called “agentic capabilities,” meaning AI will soon handle more tasks by itself, making decisions without waiting for human input.
Google is also counting how much of its total code is now written by AI. More than 30% of Google’s new code comes from AI, up from about 25% last year.
Other tech giants are seeing the same trend. Microsoft said its GitHub Copilot now writes 40% of the company’s code. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg believes AI could handle half of Meta’s software development work within a year.
Even with the rise of AI, Pichai confirmed Google will continue to hire more engineers. He said AI helps remove “grunt work” so developers can spend more time on projects they enjoy.
For now, it’s clear that AI is becoming a core part of how big tech companies build software.
