2025 Mar 14, 10:01
Google CEO Sundar Pichai gathered employees for the company's final all-hands of 2023, on December 12. It had been a stormy year inside the tech giant, starting with an unprecedented round of layoffs and ending with the company announcing its biggest artificial intelligence project to date. Google Cloud turned a profit this year for the first time. The company had launched a flurry of new AI products and updates
And, as Pichai and other executives highlighted during the meeting, Google had ended 2023 with the reveal of Gemini, its new large language model (LLM). Still, there were signs that this year had battered morale. At one point, executives shared the results of a company-wide survey, known as Googlegeist, which appeared in employees' inboxes each week. The answers were largely in line with previous years – 78% of Googlers said they were proud of the company; just 45% said their organization had a clear vision – yet the overall average engagement rate was just 36%, according to slides viewed by Business Insider
That was notably low, two employees told BI. The layoffs also hung over the room. A top-voted question asked whether executives still felt the cuts were necessary. "We tried to avoid it for as long as we could," responded Pichai, who insisted the layoffs were a difficult but "important" decision
His answer did not convince some employees. For Google, 2023 was about moving faster, finding focus, and proving it could still compete with more nimble rivals. But some employees say Google's year of efficiency has dramatically deteriorated a company culture the search giant once prided itself on.