Google Is Trying Everything to Sell AI to Skeptics
The launch of new Pixel devices featured a long lineup of celebrities and influencers paid to make the case for artificial intelligence.
Jimmy Fallon pretends to interview Google executive Rick Osterloh.
Photographer: Google
If you’re a tech company not called Apple Inc., getting regular people to pay attention to your smartphone launch is a challenge. Your executives, who simply must be involved, are stuffy, wooden and, more often than not, white and old. Even worse, they’re not famous.
So what do you do? If you’re Google, the answer apparently is: everything. On Wednesday, to promote its new range of AI-enhanced Pixel devices, the Alphabet Inc. unit surely broke the record for celebrity and influencer endorsements packed into a single hour. Expect this to become the norm as stuffy tech companies struggle to explain their artificial-intelligence offerings to an increasingly skeptical public.