Google expert: AI is redefining tech jobs

DC Velocity

Technology and search giant Google and its parent company Alphabet Inc. are known for their constant search for major—not minor—disruptive tech ideas in web and cloud markets.

Company executives often refer to their standard for success as achieving not just a 10% increase in business growth, but scoring a 10x leap that catapults those results by a factor of ten, Google executive Jared Skinner, the company’s managing director for Americas Retail, said today.

Speaking at supply chain software vendor Manhattan Associates’ annual user conference, Skinner said that artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to produce that explosive level of growth, if retail and supply chain companies learn to harness its potential.

But to get there, most organizations will have to improve both the way they manage their data and that way they use the resulting AI analysis, he warned.

“If you don’t have good data, you have bad AI,” Skinner said. Any company applying AI to its business processes needs enough clean and well-organized data to provide proper context for its AI to make good decisions.

Without sufficient data for AI to analyze, companies won’t be able to move beyond the simple chatbots that only offer canned responses to prescribed questions, he said. “The era of chatbots is dead,” Skinner said. “If your AI is not generating intelligent, connected, and dynamic conversations, it’s just a chatbot.”

And in an age when most consumers have powerful AI applications like Gemini, ChatGPT, or Claude running on their smartphones, they will quickly be able to notice those shortcomings, he warned.

Companies will only be able to take big leaps once they learn to pair smart AI with clean data, he said. As an example, Skinner said that Google has advanced over the past year from generating 50% of the software in enterprise applications to 70% with “vibe coding”—the strategy by which developers use AI to convert their ideas into technical software code.

However, productivity jumps like that will change—not replace—people’s jobs, he said. “AI is not going to eliminate everyone’s jobs, it’s just not. But everyone’s job is going to shift,” Skinner said. “You will still need a human to review and verify the results.”