Inside Google's AI turnaround: AI Mode, AI Overviews, and vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein

It feels like something has changed internally at Google. Just last week, Google Gemini hit the number one app in the App Store. I feel like nobody saw this coming.

Google's mission around have any information be universally accessible, that's a very enduring, very motivating thing, and it feels like with the AI moment, we can actually achieve that more than ever before. What I'm feeling now is just an incredible sense of focus and urgency. Things have hit a tipping point where these models are now truly able to deliver for consumers.

As ChatGPT emerged over the past couple years, as Perplexity emerged, a lot of people were just like, "Google is dead." Nobody wants to sit through search results and click links.

The core Google Search isn't really changing, in my opinion. We're not seeing that. People come to search for just ridiculously wide set of things. They want specific phone number. They want a price for something. They want to get directions. I think the vastness of that is underappreciated by many people. AI is expansionary. There's actually just more and more questions being asked and curiosity that can be fulfilled now with AI.

You've built a lot of very successful products. You use this phrase, "Embodying relentless improvement."

You need to be the physical manifestation of two pieces of things. One is just relentlessness, like just complete effort that is always exerted in a direction of positive productivity. And then the second is make things better. You have to always make things better. You're never content.

You built and launched Stories at Instagram. Back in the day, it was quite controversial because it basically took what Snapchat was doing really well and then like, "Hey, let's bring it to Instagram."

Not every great thing is going to be invented by you. Facebook probably created the modern feed, but there's a feed for every single product. At the end of the day, you're kind of just robbing your user base of the opportunity to have a better product.

Today my guest is Robbie Stein. Robbie is VP of Product for Google Search and is responsible for essentially the entire Google Search experience, including the new AI overviews, AI mode, multimodal AI experiences like Google Lens, the ranking algorithm, and a lot more. He's at the forefront of one of the biggest shifts in Google's history and has already made a massive dent in Google's trajectory. He's also made a massive dent in the trajectory of Instagram, where he was head of product and led the launch of Instagram Stories and Reels and Close Friends, and through that grew Instagram to half a billion daily active users. He's also on the founding team of Artifact with Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom, started two companies of his own. Very few people have had this level of impact on two global consumer products at this scale, and Robbie shares all of the biggest lessons that he's learned about building great and successful consumer products along with a bunch of insights into where Google is headed in the world of AI. A huge thank you to Bart Stein for suggesting topics for this conversation. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It helps tremendously. And if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of 15 incredible products, including Lovable, Replit, Bolt, Innate and Linear, Superhuman, Descript, Whisperflow, Gamma, Perplexity, Warp, Granola, Magic Patterns, Raycast, ChatPRD, and Mobben. Head on over to LennysNewsletter.com and click Product Pass. With that, I bring you Robbie Stein. My podcast guests and I love talking about craft and taste and agency and product market fit. You know what we don't love talking about? SOC 2. That's where Vanta comes in. Vanta helps companies of all sizes get compliant fast and stay that way with industry leading AI, automation, and continuous monitoring. Whether you're a startup tackling your first SOC 2 or ISO 27001, or an enterprise managing vendor risk, Vanta's Trust Management Platform makes it quicker, easier and more scalable. Vanta also helps you complete security questionnaires up to five times faster so that you can win bigger deals sooner. The result? According to a recent IDC study, Vanta customers slashed over $500,000 a year and are three times more productive. Establishing trust isn't optional. Vanta makes it automatic. Get $1,000 off at vanta.com/lenny. This episode is brought to you by Jira Product Discovery. The hardest part of building products isn't actually building products. It's everything else. It's proving that the work matters, managing stakeholders, trying to plan ahead. Most teams spend more time reacting than learning, chasing updates, justifying roadmaps, and constantly unblocking work to keep things moving. Jira Product Discovery puts you back in control. With Jira Product Discovery, you can capture insights and prioritize high impact ideas. It's flexible so it adapts to the way your team works, and helps you build a roadmap that drives alignment, not questions. And because it's built on Jira, you can track ideas from strategy to delivery all in one place. Less chasing, more time to think, learn, and build the right thing. Get Jira Product Discovery for free at atlassian.com/lenny. That's atlassian.com/lenny. Robbie, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.