Google I/O 2026: A New Era of Work Just Started | Josh Woodward

11:31Josh Woodward:And you're launching so many products that are helping people do that.

11:33Marina:Yeah, we're trying to.

11:34Josh Woodward:But for the past few years, I was sad to hear that people were saying like Google is kind of losing this AI race because people are using like all the other tools. You know, ChatGPT was the first. with LLMs when it comes to search.

11:48Marina:Yeah.

11:48Josh Woodward:How do you see the situation changing now?

11:51Marina:Yeah, well, I mean, it's very dynamic. It's very fast moving. It is. As you know, you have people on your show too. I think, first off, it's fun. I think competition, a lot of us on the team, we like that because you get this, it sharpens you. You know what I mean? So that's one, I would say. The other thing I would say though, is that there's a lot of things Google has and in some cases it's had for years. and what's fun for someone like me who's been around here a while is it's like, how do you kind of put these together in new and interesting ways? And so, you know, we talked earlier about you don't have to use connectors.

12:24Marina:That was a project we started called Personal Intelligence and it started from this idea, what if you could just tap one button and all your stuff could be connected? And I wouldn't mean that everybody wants to do it. We made it opt-in so it was like you can choose. But for a lot of people, they're like, yes, I want that. Yeah. And so I feel like it's really fun because we're in this stage where we're getting to reimagine not only kind of existing products, but combine them in new ways to make new products. Yeah. And that's just super fun to get to do.

12:54Josh Woodward:And also like fun, fun fact. My dad started using AI like a few months ago when he came here, he was visiting. Yeah. And he does like, he teaches MBA. So he needed to do some like table on weights of different like experts, etc. Yeah. So I asked Chad GPT. He was like, okay. We asked Claude. He needed some follow-up questions, but he was happy with the result. We asked Gemini. First prompt, and he was so happy. Oh, nice. Great. I had to give him a phone that's powered by Gemini so he can run all these things. And this is what makes me sad, right? It's still like if we look at B2B usage and Tropic is leading it.

13:31Marina:Yeah, yeah.

13:31Josh Woodward:What would you say will make people make this shift?

13:34Marina:Yeah. Well, I think there's a few things. I think one, the core model, a lot of the early adopters choose wherever that is. And you can even look back over the last like six months, how people have jumped from different models to different models. I know, we're jumping every week. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's a lot of that. Now that's happening kind of at the edge, the really early adopters. I think for most people in the world, they hear AI and it means all kinds of things. For some, it may be excitement, like more for you and me. For others, it may mean fear, uncertainty, or what is this thing?

14:04Marina:And so I think how we try to think about it is like, almost if you're almost thinking of a tagline, it would be like, look what Gemini can do for you. Because it's not about look what AI can do for you. It's about for your life, your problems, your daily annoyances, the things that make you grumpy. How's it going to help? And I think that's how we're trying to think about all these features is like, and it may start very small, like for your dad, that one thing may be like, whoa, that leads to another thing and another thing. So we're trying to build out these very almost bite-sized things that you'd be able to turn to your dad or I could turn to a friend and say, hey, look what this can do for you.

14:43Marina:And that's kind of how we're imagining. So over the years, you kind of learn sometimes that sometimes you get lucky and something goes incredibly viral on one thing. But often it's this accumulation of small things that add up and cause people to be like, oh, that thing, I use it for this.

14:59Josh Woodward:Yeah, I use it for this, I use it for that. Maybe I should completely lose it. That's right. Do you think Gemini's personality is important? Because we know AIs have their different personality. How would you describe Gemini's personality?

15:10Marina:Oh, that's a great question. I mean, hopefully it's helpful. Hopefully it's something that you can trust. It's like comes across. We see this in the user research. People think it's factual. It's accurate. It's precise.

15:21Josh Woodward:Not too agreeable. Yeah, that's right.

15:24Marina:We also hope that it's concise. It doesn't ramble on and on. It gets to the point. We also want it to be kind of warm, sort of friendly, but not too friendly. Do you know what I mean? And I think one of the things we've also been exploring is ways we can let people steer the personality. There's maybe something that comes out of the box by default, but then some people do want it in certain cases, we'll see this where they'll be like, be really harsh on my ideas, like Coke holes and everything. And so we want the model to have some degree of steerability too. But I do think, yeah, for us, we don't think of it though, as, you know, a friend or something you're trying to fall in love with or anything like that it's a tool and it's something that again at the end of the day hopefully it's something that's useful and helpful um do you have any tips for someone who's just

16:09Josh Woodward:starting using gemini and you mentioned some people ask it to disagree with everything like yeah is there anything that you have personally because for example i have this md file called personal constitution yes it talks about all my principles so i would upload it to every ai that i'm using so it learns my principles or my tone of voice or like a person's dossier because i use ai to write a lot of text. So I don't want it to come up with facts. Do you have like your own personal productivity setup that you would recommend to everyone?

16:35Marina:Oh, that's interesting. Yours sounds good, by the way.

16:38Josh Woodward:Yeah, I love it. Because then AI really becomes your strategic partner versus just an answer machine.

16:43Marina:Okay, that's what I was going to say. The biggest shift I feel like years ago I made was instead of just going to it one off, actually trying to build that context. Like you use empty files, it sounds like.

16:54Josh Woodward:How do you create this context? Like how do you store it?

16:56Marina:Yeah. So, I mean, I have certain files like you've got now, like something like Gemini Spark. These are all now skills that are in there. I've turned on personal intelligence. So it knows kind of my backstory of all my Gmail and calendar and drive. The other thing I do is it's very good if you ask it. So one thing I try to do pretty regularly is I'll ask it, what are the things I'm doing that I should no longer be doing? Or what are the patterns you see me using in Gemini that I should just not do or I can make better. And so I almost use it as a mirror in that way to sort of reflect. That's interesting.

17:32Marina:I've also, I've got tons of notebooks, which now I'll sync across Gemini too, which are awesome. So I've got ones who's like everything I've ever written that I feel like is like my best writing, not for the style necessarily, although it takes on some of that, but also just the ideas. I read a lot of books.

17:51Josh Woodward:And just going back on that. So when you have all your newsletters inside a notebook and you ask Gemini a question, it can reference those newsletters because it's one whole ecosystem. That's right. Do you have to specifically point it out, like go to my notebook or it knows?

18:05Marina:Yeah, usually today how it works is you can just hit the plus icon and just add that notebook to your prompt. Or if you go into the notebook itself, it takes all that context automatically.

18:14Josh Woodward:I wonder if it's, I'm just thinking from the user perspective, is it too much context? Because it has access to Gmail, you know, calendar, notebook. is there like do you need to kind of narrow it down and say only take these things like what

18:27Marina:would yeah we're actually experimenting with this right now so in a product like notebook lm as you know you can change which sources it uses to sort of shape the answer um but i don't know if the ui paradigms for all this are really have settled yet because i think that's one of the things we're finding too is these models love context but then finding the right context finding right

18:49Josh Woodward:context, not eating all the tokens. Because I've been using Gmail since 2015, right? Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

18:55Marina:Exactly. We all get too many emails. That's right. But I think what you'll find model over model and even this three point flash model way better at these things. We have we put it through all these tests. Can it retrieve the right stuff? Can it synthesize the right stuff? It's very good at this. And I think that'll just keep getting better, too.

19:12Josh Woodward:Okay, so you would recommend you put your best newsletters? Yeah, that's what I do.

19:17Marina:I put that in. I have another one where I read a lot. So any of the notes or books, you know, I take lots of notes. I use Readwise for Kindle highlights. I sync all that. So you can almost imagine my own collection of like experts that are quotes, things that have shaped how I think. That's a whole other area I put in as well. Yeah.

19:39Josh Woodward:Okay. So it's I feel like we live in an era when everyone has to organize their personal context. Yeah. Because it's so important to launch your agents. They have to have a proper base on what they're acting. If you and I were having coffee after this episode, I'd certainly pull up my phone and say, look what I tried this week. It changed how my tea works. This is what I do all the time. To share these kinds of things that don't fit into the podcast, I started my newsletter. Every week, I write about AI tools, strategies, and experiments I'm running in my own business with real numbers, real results, templates that you can use, and also honest mistakes.

20:16Josh Woodward:If you want to be in the loop, the link is waiting for you in the description. Okay, let's talk about AGI. I've heard it. I've heard that word so many times yesterday on stage and I'm like, oh, because last year, I remember Demis talking with Sergey here at Google Ior. And they were kind of predicting maybe in five years. Yesterday, I was like, we made another step towards AGI with this model. What is AGI for me? For a normal person, what does that mean?

20:44Marina:Yeah, and at this point, it's been thrown around so much. It has lost, I think, a lot of its meaning in some ways. To be honest with you, I don't think about it all the time all that much. There's a spectrum of people who are talking about it every time they get on a stage. I'm probably more on the other side of it. I think at some level, it's probably like, is there an app or some sort of experience software you can probably talk to that is able to kind of answer almost like superhuman questions for you? And I try to think always the best products make you feel something. And so to me, I think less about how many years away and things are, but more probably what are the feelings or the experience you would get interacting with something that's that good.

21:26Marina:And it probably would feel something like, man, it just like saves me so much time. It's like mental relief. Or even I imagine, I'm hoping it'll be fun. Like it'll be able to kind of bring up things and insights and connect dots that you wouldn't otherwise do. So I tend to think of it a little bit more that way, I guess, from like a product perspective, as opposed to some of these maybe bigger thoughts and timelines and things and specific definitions.

21:52Josh Woodward:How do you think it's going to change our workflow? Because you're releasing so many features for workflows. Will the workflow exist at all if AI is capable of so many things?

22:01Marina:I happen to think it still will actually, because I think there's still going to be a huge premium. And I'm actually sympathetic to the argument that actually things like human judgment, human taste, these things are actually going to become more valuable than they have been even in today or in the past.

22:16Josh Woodward:But then also AI can learn your taste. This is what I'm trying to do within my team right now. Yeah, yeah. Teach AI my taste. So we're collecting all my feedback that I'm giving to my team. Yeah. And like, let's teach AI that so it can help me make decisions.

22:27Marina:Yeah, yeah. I think that may still happen and probably will. we do things similar where you can almost simulate like a meeting before the meeting ever happens. And you can almost like anticipate the feedback you'll get. Maybe that's what you're doing on your team. The other thing I would say is I do think on the workflows point, we are seeing like areas where AI today can get you maybe to like a really good first draft. And maybe let's assume it'll get you to a second, third or fourth draft. It'll get better. But there's still something about creating and I'm finding in small teams of people, it's just so fun.

23:02Marina:And it's hard to imagine. I don't know. I wouldn't want to give that up. And you could imagine there will be like single person, giant companies or whatever, all the predictions. But to me, it's like life is about the memories and the people you're doing it with too. And so it feels like hopefully we're going to put a lot of power tools on the table and let small groups of people just create amazing stuff.

23:23Josh Woodward:Yeah. What would you say to someone who's starting their career now and worried about AI?

23:27Marina:I mean, the advice I continue to try to even give myself is just every week, be on the edge of these tools and try to figure out, like, build an intuition for what they're really good at and what they're not good at. And then the important thing is what's, like, almost possible. Because in another maybe rev or two of the models, that may become possible. So I think that's probably a new skill set. I think there's a lot of soft skills and maybe EQ around some of this too, is how to deal with uncertainty, how to invent things, how to adapt to things. So there's a whole set of things even beyond just the core tool usage, I would say.

24:09Josh Woodward:Can we learn some of your culture as well? Because you're rolling out so many products. Like, as you mentioned, this voice feature, you coded it like two weeks ago and it was on stage yesterday. How are you able to manage all of that, let alone like having four kids? I can't imagine that. Is there a principle? Is there a life hack?

24:29Marina:Oh, I wish there was a life hack. If you find it, let me know. I mean, I'd say it's a lot of things. I mean, part of it, I think just as an individual, I try to think about what are the things in life that I really want to prioritize. guys. And some of them are at work, but a lot of them are outside work. I mean, life's way more than just work, right? So I think that's just like a personal thing. I think at work, I think it's a lot about small teams with these tools can do remarkable things. And so there's been a big shift. A lot of our Google Labs projects, they start with like five, six people maybe, and you kind of are hunting for like, what's an interesting problem to solve that'll really make a difference in a certain set of people's lives.

25:14Marina:And then you kind of just let them cook. And we try to minimize all the reviews and all the stuff you could imagine. And I think that's, to me, the best thing people say is like, oh, this is like, I'm empowered. We built this thing in two weekends. You know what I mean? To me, that's like we're hitting the mark. And then what the other part of this is you'll build a lot of stuff. Some of it, maybe you get lucky. It becomes an AI studio or a notebook LM or Google Flow. So a lot of it though doesn't work. What's the percentage of the things that don't work? I wish I would know. I mean, what I will say is it usually takes us three, four, five times on an idea before we realize that's it or just ditch it.

25:53Marina:Yeah.

25:53Josh Woodward:What's the metric that you're looking for?

25:55Marina:You know, it's funny. We don't look as much at like retention or dashboards. I always kind of tell the teams and I try to go with them on a lot of these. You see it in people's eyes. When they use the thing, do their eyes light up? Or are they like recoil?

26:10Josh Woodward:If you're an entrepreneur launching something, how do you try to sit down with a customer and just watch them visit?

26:16Marina:Go to the coffee shops, go to the student unions, go out in the real world. Really, I'm always trying to keep our teams as little as time possible in conference rooms, thinking and theorizing about stuff. It's like, take it out here, go talk to those two guys, see what they say. And that's when you really know how far off you are from your sort of lofty concepts to like reality.

26:40Josh Woodward:That's fascinating. And so, and then you just see people's faces light up and this is how you know you're going to continue working on it.

26:46Marina:Yeah, you're trying to develop an intuition of like, because the biggest thing is you make something no one wants. That's the biggest risk. And so you're trying to find like, did that strike a nerve with her or with him? And like, is this -

26:59Josh Woodward:How you quantify that? Because you're in a large organization also. Exactly, exactly. You just go to people and say, oh, I saw their eyes light up. we're going to put like a billion. Yeah, yeah.

27:08Marina:Well, you take it step by step. You don't go from like zero to a billion. But I do think it's very countercultural to a very data-driven place like Google or other big tech companies or even startups, right? You're looking for like, what's that? Yeah. And we'll get to that. But it's kind of that early stage. One of the biggest things is doing like all big things start small. And we're very lucky at a place like Google. You We saw Sundar showed that slide with all these huge products with a billion users and things. But actually, all those things originally started going to coffee shops or showing it to your friends and seeing, like, is this something people are going to like?

27:44Marina:And that's how Notebook LM started. That's how Flow started. That's how AI Studio started. So now, you know, they've got millions and millions of people. But it all kind of starts, people forget that it starts in the trenches. It starts very small. And then you'll get to what are our DAOs? What's our D7 retention? What's our ARR? All that stuff comes, but you got to get out of the first phase, which is like, does anyone even care about what you're working on?

28:07Josh Woodward:What would you say to an entrepreneur who's working right now, building these ideas? Five times he tried, nothing's working. What's the mindset they should be adopting?

28:16Marina:Yeah, that's always the hardest part we have, too, is like you believe in your idea. You're on your third or fourth or fifth iteration. I think sometimes the cash just runs out and that's when you know. In our case, sometimes what I've noticed is the core team, those four, five, six people, they often know before I do if there's anything here. And so sometimes you just have to face that moment. I also like to be, when we're doing this with our teams, so clear of like, all right, well, let's try it. We have one more shot. And everyone kind of gives it one more shot. It's a lot like if you're playing on a sports team or something, you know, you kind of put it all out on the field and you kind of see if it works or not.

29:00Marina:Yeah.

29:00Josh Woodward:Sometimes you're just more like, if I text, take another step, then it's going to work and you're like, you don't know when to stop. And you know, it's funny.

29:07Marina:Sometimes I know we've stopped things too early. Sometimes they go too long. I think that's the other thing I try to remind the teams is like, it's a lot more art than science at that stage. It's a lot more gut and sort of like feel.

29:20Josh Woodward:What's the next big AI trend you're predicting?

29:22Marina:Ooh, that's good.

29:23Josh Woodward:Something that you're seeing maybe.

29:25Marina:Yeah, I mean, you hit on one. I'll think if there's others too, but I was spending a couple of minutes on voice.

29:30Josh Woodward:Oh, voice.

29:30Marina:I think we are on the cusp of like a big shift to voice. So that one immediately comes to mind. The other one, I am not sure people have fully internalized, even at Google, is how fast these models are going to get and how quickly. So 3.5 flash is already way faster than what we had before. but even the demo we showed, Sundar showed with the dinosaur, the dino game, 1 ,500 tokens per second. This is coming. This is not theoretical. We have this running at Google internally right now. And when you can stream that fast, it changes everything. We've seen that over time with search. Every time we make a feature faster, more people use it.

30:10Marina:So speed's a feature. And I think that's one part of these models that's just around the corner that's going to be incredible.

30:17Josh Woodward:Okay, so we're going to be iterating on so many ideas, I guess, really fast.

30:22Marina:Well, practically, that's how it's going to happen. What used to take like send, wait a few seconds, is just going to be like boom, boom, boom, boom. And that'll be amazing for all the image, video, audio stuff. It'll also be amazing for anything with agents or anything with multi-steps because it'll just compress. And so...

30:41Josh Woodward:And there's some research accelerating. That's the thing.

30:43Marina:Yeah, then you apply that to something like our science tools or other things. You've got all this discovery that's just waiting to happen. So I'm very excited about that. I think that'll be fun.

30:52Josh Woodward:Yeah. My last question is, your daughters are five, six years old. Mine are five and six. Yeah, yeah. She's almost five.

31:00Marina:Yeah.

31:01Josh Woodward:What do you think their future is going to look like?

31:03Marina:Oh, it's so hard to imagine right now.

31:06Josh Woodward:Is it going to be totally different? Or do you ever think it's just going to be the same? Things will happen in a different way, but it's going to be the same life.

31:12Marina:I mean, it's interesting because I think in some ways, human nature is remarkably resilient, right? For its virtues and vices. So some of that I predict will be the same. But I do think our kind of almost human computer interaction feels like it will be way different. And I don't know, you talked to your parents, you mentioned your dad earlier, I think about my parents or my wife's, and then it's like, you hear them talk about when they were in the workforce and suddenly like spreadsheets showed up and you know for us it's like oh yeah of course we worked it's like no big deal but it's like um i wonder if there'll be feelings like that where our like our girls will be like yeah of course you just talk to this thing and it does all this magic and it's like done in like 200 milliseconds yeah so i i do wonder i mean you sit in a waymo today and you think about i can't believe i'm in this car driving on the highway.

32:08Marina:And so I think there'll be many of these shifts. I'm very excited though for them, you know, uh, to be able, what it's going to do for what they can learn about. What's the main principle you're trying to instill in that? I think for them, I'm trying to teach them a lot about like, you can both create anything you can think of, but you can also, if something doesn't make sense to you, just tell it to describe it in something you're really interested in. One of our girls is so into soccer right now. She can't wait for the World Cup. And so there's a lot of like lessons from even like kindergarten where we're just kind of translating it into like, oh, what if Ronaldo was doing it this way or what?

32:50Marina:You know what I mean? And like, that's the kind of stuff that just feels like it'll be like at their fingertips. It's pretty fun to think about.

32:57Josh Woodward:Fascinating.

32:57Marina:Yeah. Yeah.

32:58Josh Woodward:Thank you so much, Josh. It was amazing. I'm looking forward to all of the updates from you because whenever you release something, that means I'm using it in my workflow. because I love where you're building.

33:08Marina:Well, thank you and keep the feedback coming. We'll follow up on your feedback requests.

33:11Josh Woodward:Oh, thank you so much. Thank you.

33:13Marina:Did you know if your windows are bare,

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