Google's Nick Fox on the Future of Search and AI

Why It Matters

The comments signal Google’s product roadmap and competitive stance: prioritizing trusted, grounded AI over fast-to-market but error-prone chat experiences, which will shape user adoption, ad relevance and market dynamics across search and generative AI.

Summary

Google’s VP Nick Fox framed trust and accuracy as the foundation of the company’s AI strategy, recounting how the arrival of early conversational models like ChatGPT forced Google to accelerate but not compromise on quality. Google doubled down on long-term infrastructure and model investments—TPUs, DeepMind acquisitions and its Gemini models—to combine conversational interfaces with web grounding and speed. Fox said the company aims to let users ask anything by reinventing the search box and integrating AI across products, avoiding a rushed release of half-baked models. He portrayed the approach as balancing rapid iteration with maintaining reliability for sensitive queries like health and education.

Original Description

Nick Fox, Google's SVP of Knowledge & Information, sat down with Semafor editor-in-chief Ben Smith at Google Marketing Live 2026 for an editorial interview to talk about the future of search and the broader internet in the age of AI, how marketers should approach the changing technology, the role of creators, agentic commerce, and more.