A Google Search exec said that one of the company’s biggest opportunities in AI lies in its ability to get to know the user better and personalize its responses.
The promise is AI that’s uniquely helpful because it knows you. But the risk is AI that feels more like surveillance than service.
In a recent episode of the Limitless podcast, Robby Stein, VP of Product for Google Search, explained that Google’s AI tends to field more queries that are advice-seeking or those where the user is looking for recommendations — and these types of questions are more likely to benefit from more subjective responses.
“We think there’s a huge opportunity for our AI to know you better and then be uniquely helpful because of that knowledge,” Stein said in the interview. “And one of the things we talked about at [Google’s developer conference] I/O was how the AI can get a better understanding of you through connected services like Gmail.”
Google has been integrating AI into its apps for some time, starting back when Gemini was still known as Bard. More recently, it began pulling personal data into another AI product, Gemini Deep Research. And Gemini is now infused into Google Workspace apps like Gmail, Calendar and Drive.
But as Google integrates more personal data into its AI — spanning your emails, documents, photos, location history, and browsing behavior — the line between a helpful assistant and an intrusive one becomes increasingly blurred. And unlike opt-in services, avoiding Google’s data collection may become harder as AI becomes central to its products.
Google’s pitch is that this deep personalization makes the AI far more useful. The idea is that Google’s AI technology could learn from the user’s interactions across Google’s various services, then use that understanding to make more personalized recommendations. For instance, if it learned that a user likes particular products or brands, the AI responses might favor those in its recommendations.
That, Stein said, would be “much more useful” than just showing users a more generic list of the best-selling products in a given category. “That is, I think, very much the vision — of building something that can be really knowledgeable for you, specifically.”
This idea isn’t all that different from how the “Others” in the hit Apple TV show “Pluribus” have gobbled up the world’s knowledge, including intimate details about individuals. When the system interacts with the show’s protagonist, Carol, it uses that data to personalize everything: cooking her favorite …