Google's Former CEO Schmidt Says Remote Work Hurts Its AI Competitiveness
On August 14 Beijing time, Eric Schmidt, the former CEO and chairman of Google, believes that remote work has weakened Google's competitiveness in the artificial intelligence race.
Schmidt previously gave a lecture at Stanford University. On Tuesday, the video of this lecture has been uploaded to YouTube by Stanford University. In the lecture, someone asked him why startups such as OpenAI and Anthropic can now lead Google in the field of artificial intelligence.
Schmidt replied: Google believes that work-life balance, going home early and working from home are more important than winning. The reason why startups succeed is that their employees are working拼命.
I'm sorry to be so straightforward, but the truth is that if you all leave the university to start a company, if you want to compete with other startups, you won't let your employees work at home and only come to the company one day a week. He said.
Schmidt served as Google's CEO and chairman from 2001 to 2011, and then returned the CEO position to Google co-founder Larry Page. He continued to serve as Google's executive chairman and technical advisor, and finally left the company in early 2020.
Schmidt is not the only executive who thinks remote work is bad for businesses. Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, also thinks so, and he has been outspoken in advocating that employees return to the office to work. Dimon said in an interview with The Economist in July 2023: Remote work is not suitable for young apprentices, not conducive to inspiring creativity and spontaneity, and not suitable for managing teams.
However, since 2022, Google has been gradually reducing the arrangement of allowing employees to work remotely 100%. According to Google's 2022 Diversity Report, Google employees currently adopt a hybrid work model, working in the office for about three days a week, and the other two days in the place they feel is most suitable for work, whether it is in the office or at home.
CNBC reported in June 2023 that according to the internal memo they saw, Google has also begun to track the attendance rate of office badges and use it as an indicator in performance evaluations. Of course, not everyone believes in 'magical corridor conversations', but there is no doubt that working together in the same room has a positive impact. Fiona Cicconi, Google's chief human resources officer, wrote in an employee email at that time. As of the time of dispatch, Google has not responded to this.