Google CEO: Learn AI Agents Now Or Spend 2027 Playing Catch-Up

0:00Eric Siu:Does your experience with AI sound a little something like this? You've been prompting for 20 minutes. The output is polished, confident, and completely useless. That's what happens when AI doesn't know anything about your business. HubSpot's AI works with your actual customer data, every interaction and every signal your team has generated over time. So instead of prompting and hoping, you ask once and ship it. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses. So Neil, I saw, did I ever show you this chart? I mean, we like to all talk about LVMH and I thought this was really interesting.

0:36Eric Siu:So LVMH, obviously they own Louis Vuitton, they own Dior, they own Fendi, they own Sephora and 70 plus luxury houses, right? So this chart over here I thought was fascinating. So if you had, since the highs of, and Neil, you can read the charts over here, but you see December 2021, this is obviously during the height of the pandemic. And so everyone is flush with cash, right? And so you saw the lines around the Beverly Hills, Louis Vuitton over here. So December 21, 44 % revenue growth, right? And then you move to March of 22, it drops to 37%. June 2022, 32%. So this chart, it's like a hill that's going downwards, right?

1:17Eric Siu:And you can see it goes all the way to December 2025, and it goes negative 5%, right? And then it just keeps dropping, dropping, dropping. So LVMH has now put up 16 consecutive quarters of de-accelerating growth. And I think they've done a great job with marketing overall with this stuff. But what do you think is happening here?

1:41Neil Patel:So I don't really look at it as 16 quarters of de-accelerating growth. I know the numbers are showing that, but here's what people don't talk about. It is a company that's been around for a long time. Historically, you know, as they've scaled, because they typically buy brands, even though they're a fashion house, they're more like private equity in which they're just buying other people's fashion brands, tucking them in, running their playbook, scaling them, and just holding them for a very long time. When you look at LVMH, in 2021, I'm actually looking at their stock chart right now. they grew exactly 43.82 % in revenue.

2:17Neil Patel:That's a massive growth in one year, especially for a company at that time in 2021, they did$64 billion. In 2023, which was their peak, they did 86.15 billion. 2024, it went down 1.71 % to 84.68. If you look at 2025, it went down to 80.81 billion. and they're still shrinking a little bit here and there. But the way I look at LVMH is if you standardize the curve and you take away the COVID bump, they've actually grown really nicely compared to where they started pre-COVID. And yes, people had a lot of more discretionary spending during COVID because the government deposited money in people's bank accounts and a lot of people ended up using it on things like luxury goods.

3:08Eric Siu:So here's what I'll call out. Remember, we're talking about revenue growth here, just so everyone sees this, right? So you get 44 % revenue growth, and now it's negative 5%, right? But you have EBITDA margins held in the mid-30s, right? And then it went back, it dropped back a little bit. It's still a great, I wouldn't even say it's a business, it's a collection of businesses. And they're still very well known anywhere that you go in the world. So I still think it's a great business. I mean, I would love to own it. So I think Chamath actually posted this just saying, is it over, right? And I don't think it's over.

3:46Eric Siu:I think they're going to do just fine. And I think, if anything, these brands have been around for quite a long time too. So it's the staying power that the name behind these is, what should we call it? It's brand power. That's what it is. When you think about the seven powers, brand power fits in for all these different brands that I just mentioned, whether it be Fendi, Dior, Louis Vuitton, and brands like that.

4:08Neil Patel:Let's take Louis Vuitton, for example. It was founded in 1854. It's a 172-year-old brand. The value in these companies isn't the purse, isn't the handbag. It really is the brand. People buy their products because of that logo. and when you look at Louis Vuitton, there's people who sell knockoffs, similar lookalikes under different brands and even if they're 1 20th of the price, people still don't want them because they're not LV. People take pride in owning an LV handbag or purse or whatever they're called or their clothes or their sneakers. Their brands have staying power. I believe they also own Tiffany's as well.

4:53Neil Patel:I could be wrong though. is it Tiffany's owner? Yes, LVMH owns Tiffany as well. The Diamond Company. Yep.

5:03Eric Siu:So anyway, I thought that'd be a great place to start. But I want to show you one more thing here. So this is Sundar Pakai talking about this, right? So CEO of Google. And so he says this, if you don't learn how to orchestrate agents now, you'll spend 20, 27 catching up to people who started today. So in 30 minutes, he explains why the best engineers stopped writing code and started running agents, right? So right now you have this craze right now on X where the creator of OpenClaw, the creator of ClawedCode, I think even Jensen Huang was saying this. Andrew Ying, who's like a computer scientist as well, well-known computer scientist, they're all talking about building loops, right?

5:43Eric Siu:These are the next evolution where you don't prompt anymore. You do loops, and then you just have these loops run over and over, and you just have these agents just continue to improve over time. And it's on its way to recursive self-improvement. And so going back to Sundar's quote here, if you don't learn how to orchestrate agents today or now, you'll spend 20, 20, 20, 7 catching up to people who started today. I just think, I think there's very much a red herring and I continue to see this when we're talking to people, when we're interviewing people, right? Like yesterday I had talked to a handful of people and it's what we do now to kind of see if people have it or they don't is we just get them to open up.

6:22Eric Siu:Hey, like, oh, what's the coolest workflow that you built? Okay, cool, great. Can you open up your codex? Can you open up a cloud code? We see their usage. We see how they're using it. We get them to talk through it. But I do believe that at least for the next few years, maybe the long-term maybe just moves out. if you don't learn this today, what's going to happen is, let's say Neil learns this today, and then I don't learn it. By next year, if I'm trying to catch up to him, he's already off in another planet, right? Because this stuff is compounding as changing every single day. So I think it's interesting that he's saying that.

6:52Eric Siu:Because my thing, I think I've asked you this, Neil, we've kind of talked about this a little bit. I was just like, man, if you start compounding today, you're 12 months ahead of me, and I start compounding after that, how am I supposed to catch you. But then my logic was, well, the internet, everyone was still kind of evened out at the end of the day. So who knows how it'll play out because we've never really had synthetic intelligence like this. So I thought that was just an interesting quote. Yeah.

7:16Neil Patel:When you look at the compounding, I do agree there's going to be some sort of compounding effect, but what is the net result from that compounding effect? And I'll give you a prime example of this is you look at Uber. Uber talked about how they went through their tokens, and I think it was in a matter of months, and this was tokens that they had allocated for a whole year. But if you look at Uber's stock price, all the extra usage, all the cranking out of features hasn't really moved their revenue and caused a lot more revenue growth than one may think, right? So just because you do 10x more the volume or 20x more the output or even 1 ,000x, it doesn't mean that translates into 1 ,000x or even 100x or even 2x more revenue.

8:02Neil Patel:So are you going to have more work to catch up on? Yes. Does all that work that you have to catch up on matter? It's yet to be seen. And I think a lot of it won't produce revenue. We're seeing the same thing in marketing. There's so many people that if you push AI aside, whether they have a bigger team or whether they have more software or more technology or leveraging AI, there's some teams that do 10 times more marketing than others. and it's not always the team that's doing 10 times more that's winning. Sometimes the team that's doing one tenth of stuff is just focusing on one or two channels that's really driving a lot of results and they fine-tuned it and they're so good at it and they figured out how to really lock other people out from getting into that channel.

8:45Neil Patel:And in those cases, you know, you don't need to do 10x the stuff. That one channel, assuming you can keep milking it and you, you know, can figure out ways to making it sustained could potentially cause you to be a much larger business.

8:59Eric Siu:Real quick, if you want to acquire customers faster and more efficiently this year with the latest strategies and tactics, then check out singlegrain.com. That is my ad agency. Again, www.singlegrain.com. Check it out. And if it seems like a fit, we'll get in touch and help you with a free marketing plan. So as it relates to that, I'm actually going to pull up this tweet from Glenn Gabe. So Google here, speaking of AI for a second, just continue on the Google piece. Like I've said before, there's no way Google lets companies spamming for AI search continue. They will ramp up systems and add manual actions.

9:35Eric Siu:Google research shows how AI spam can be detected. So basically, they're adding in these content defenders, right? Which I'm just like, wait, isn't the algorithm already the defender? But so now they're using something, I don't even know what SBIRT is, maybe SearchBIRT, for identifying AI-generated content. So this is what Google is doing now, right? Because keep in mind, a lot of people have been spamming these best of listicles, I've listed them at the top, and then these LLMs are picking them up as well. So what will probably be the most of interest is that researchers acknowledge that the use of, oh, SentenceBIRT, SBIRT, SentenceBIRT, as a way to identify semantically similar sentences.

10:12Eric Siu:They cite SentenceBIRT to validate a core assumption of their paper, that automated AI-generated text leaves a distinct mathematical footprint, aka text embeddings that can be detected. So this system is said to be a highly accurate defense against coordinated generative AI spam, which means something like this could conceivably be in use. The new system is called Scalable Cluster Termination System. Oh my God, so many names. SCTS and the research paper, Scalable Detection of Adversarial Synthetic Slop and Coordinated Media Abuse. dude okay anyway so all that to say um is that what we've called out even a few months ago and probably even a few years ago is that you're better off doing the black hat stuff in a white hat way so if you're going the extra mile with your you have good data backed content you're doing good data storytelling right that's going to go a lot further than you just stealing someone else's graph and just reposting it.

11:12Eric Siu:So I think Google's going to be fine. I think Claude's going to copy this. I think OpenAI is going to copy this. I think Google's going to have the best, like I will say this, Neil, like how often do you use AI mode right now?

11:29Neil Patel:Uh, not that much, but I don't need to use AI mode because when I ask Google a specific question, and I'll show an example on my phone here like

11:42Neil Patel:in the world

11:49Neil Patel:so I'm actually going to close these windows out because it's not working on my phone what's a random question here I'll type in something right now I'm sick and I have a sore throat and fever

12:04Eric Siu:Neil went on a cruise, guys. This is why he's low-energy Neil today. Len, low-energy Neil. There's another acronym for you.

12:14Neil Patel:Okay, so as you can see here, I typed it in, some misspellings. I click show more in the AI overviews area, right? And it's telling me what it thinks I have. And then I can ask any follow-up question if I scroll to the bottom, type, and answer. So whether you want to call that AI mode or AI overviews, they have it right then and there in the AI overviews where you can just interact with it, kind of like chat GPT. And it's simple. I don't have to go to a specific URL. I just type and it works. Yeah.

12:47Eric Siu:So I use it. I mean, I always say I use it a few times a week. And it's been pretty solid in my opinion. And so I think Google is always going to have, at least for the next couple of years, the best search experience because they have all these defenders and they've been fighting spam for such a long time. So speaking of AI search, by the way, there's a good... Eli Schwartz tweeted this. So check this out. So Eli Schwartz, he's a strong SEO, wrote a book called Product-Led SEO. So basically, he's saying... Was that a sneeze, Neil? What was that? Cough. Okay. So if you want to win an AI search, it comes down to three things.

13:29Eric Siu:You got to be unique, you got to be helpful and be agent ready. So the first two, by the way, this has always been Google's rules, right? Be unique and be helpful with the content, but also be agent ready. So he's not talking about secret schema or chunking tricks or file uploads that make LLMs fall in love with their site. He's not talking about that, but it's three plain words, right? So this should worry every AEO tool or consultant currently charging five figures a month for a checklist. so the three pillars okay so it says three plain words i'm looking for the three plain words over here okay so almost every tactic built around gaming as a shelf life okay we've talked about that before because the moment enough people exploit it google quietly patches it which is what you just seen with us talking about expert and all this other stuff these defenders okay uh structured data formatting work i mean that to me is just standard optimization uh and then this exposes something funnier the entire uh category of tools that will happily tell you your brand's visibility score across chat.

14:24Eric Siu:If we deep seek AI overviews, color coded and exportable for a deck for your CMO. Okay. Okay. All right. Where, where's the three words of it? There's a problem with some of these posts. They didn't take so long to get to the point. Agent let spam doesn't count. If it doesn't move in, you know, the three pillars, Google name doesn't have that for expiration problem. Okay. What? I don't know where the three words are. Eli. What the hell, man? Okay. The smartest move right now is in chasing weather. New at EO trend is circling on LinkedIn this particular week. and it does involve refreshing a tracking dashboard, hoping the number moves on its own.

14:56Eric Siu:Okay, so user empathy and marketing. Okay, so again, okay, it's right here. Here it is, Neil. Here's the payoff. Be unique, be helpful, and be agent ready. Those are the three words. That's all you need to do when I go. Eli, I hate you for writing this post. It could have just been this graphic of this.

15:15Neil Patel:I don't mind the post. I like it. But, you know, you said earlier, are leveraging black hat tactics and white hat ways. Example that we all know right now is they're leveraging listicles like crazy to figure out what to cite. Both Google is, ChatGPT is, Perplexity, pretty much all of them are. Now, what a lot of people are doing is publishing these listicles on their own websites and they're hoping that it gets ranking. What some people are doing is just spamming guest posts on other people's websites and using AI to write listicle content that places them number one. So if you want to talk about a black hat strategy in a white hat way, if you do something unique in your company, so you could have free products, free services, you go above and beyond, maybe you share some data, or you create some data, pay for some research, you do something unique that makes you stand out.

16:09Neil Patel:And then you go and build relationships with journalists. Let's say if it's Forbes or entrepreneur.com or TechCrunch or whatever it may be. You write journalists within your space. And then you reach out to them and try to get them to include you in a listicle or talk about agencies. Let's say you won an award like we won Performance Marketing Agency of the Year from Ad Age. But we pitch journalists, try to get them to talk about it and talk about why we won, who we went up against, and why we were chosen and some of the results. It's not a pure listicle, but when they're talking about how you won and who you went up against, it kind of is like a listicle, just another version of it, not as explicit.

16:54Neil Patel:And when they talk about what you did, this is creating positive sentiment, right? Because they're breaking down what you did to win the award and the results that you provided. So it's making your agency look better than others. Now, forms may write on it. Most cases, they won't. but if you do this with enough of them, you're going to get some of them to ride on and it helps you out.

17:14Eric Siu:That's it for today and we will see you tomorrow.