Alphabet's earnings show investors are impatient for the data on AI returns. No one has the answer yet.
In Tuesday's earnings call, investors repeatedly asked Alphabet execs for data about returns on AI projects, getting little information in response.
Beck Diefenbach/Reuters
- Google's parent company, Alphabet, had its earnings call on Tuesday, reporting mixed results.
- During the call, investors repeatedly pressed execs for data on the rate of return for AI projects.
- Despite several questions, Alphabet's leadership had limited information to share.
In Tuesday's earnings call, investors repeatedly pressed Alphabet's leadership team for more information about how its AI initiatives are performing and how they would generate revenue, but executives remained tight-lipped.
One investor, referencing the rollout of AI overviews to summarize Google Search results, asked specifically about click-through rates and the monetization levels of the AI overview compared to traditional searches.
Both CEO Sundar Pichai and senior vice president and chief business officer Philipp Schindler chimed in, but neither gave a specific number.
"We have rolled it out in the US, and we will be through the course of the year, definitely scaling it up," Pichai responded. "Both to more countries, and also, you know, we have taken a conservative start, focused on quality, making sure the metrics are healthy and so on, but you will see us expand the use cases around it."
Schindler, in his response, added that "innovation and improvements to the user experience on search have historically opened up new opportunities for advertisers," but didn't give any further information about Alphabet's revenue from advertisers on its AI features.
In April the CEO of Google DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, said that Google plans to invest more than $100 billion over time to develop AI technology.
The tech giant has already made other investments in AI, including $2 billion to the AI startup Anthropic, $3 billion in investments to build and expand its data centers, and $60 million to train its AIs on Reddit's user posts.
A second investor urged Pichai to "go a little bit deeper" in terms of how AI is actually being adopted and implemented, what it could mean for the strategic positioning of Alphabet's cloud business, and the potential for AI workloads to "be a stimulant to revenue growth."
"On the cloud and AI stuff, you know, it's obviously, you know, you know, something which I think will end up being a big driver over time," Pichai said. "I mentioned in my opening remarks already, if you take a look at our AI infrastructure and generative AI solutions for cloud across everything we do — be it compute on the AI side, the products we have through vertex AI Gemini for workspace and Gemini for Google Cloud, et cetera — we definitely are seeing traction."
The company's cloud business crossed $10 billion in revenue for the first time, reaching $10.3 billion — fueled in part by AI demand, Pichai said.
But he offered no specifics about how Alphabet plans to ramp up monetization of its various AI ventures, instead saying Alphabet now has "over 2 million developers playing around with these things" — flexing a massive expense, but not a concrete return, the company has taken on in its pursuit of AI dominance.
Other investors were more pointed, asking if the AI industry is close to "hitting some kind of wall on foundation model improvement in AI training" due to the lack of new data to train on or other limitations. In response, Pichai stressed that underinvestment now is a greater risk than sinking too much money into the projects.
"The risk of under-investing is dramatically greater than the risk of over-investing for us here," Pichai said. "Even in scenarios where you know, if it turns out that we are over-investing, we clearly these are infrastructure, which is widely useful for us."
He quickly added: "Having said that, we obsess around every dollar we put in."
Representatives for Alphabet did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
Alphabet reported beating Q2 revenue and profits estimates but missed YouTube ad revenue. It also announced a $5 billion investment in Waymo autonomous taxis.