Should Google (GOOGL) be worried about Walmart’s (WMT) rapid success using generative AI to humanize search? Some say yes; I say no. Walmart CEO Doug McMillon has positioned the company as a retail innovator – and he recently talked up Walmart’s generative AI-assisted search capabilities – but unless Walmart is going full “Miracle on 34th Street,” it should have very little impact on how Google spends its day.

However… Google should be very, very worried about how generalized generative AI platforms (such as Perplexity) are going to eat into their ad revenue. These AI models use bots to crawl the web in real time to collect and surface information in easy-to-understand paragraphs. The bots get the info they need to prompt the generative AI apps, but they don’t click on ads. If I were Sergey, that would keep me up at night.

That said, Google practically invented transformer models, they have one of the largest collections of big brains on the planet, and I’m sure they will get their consumer-facing act together very soon. Unless this is Google’s Kodak moment…

Nah… it couldn’t be. Google is way too smart for that…

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