Google's new AI-based system for fielding questions ahead of its company-wide meetings is giving its leaders an easy out, employees said.
Previously, through an internal tool called Dory, workers could pose their own questions and upvote others that they wanted answered at the company’s monthly “TGIF” staff meetings. Google leaders, including CEO Sundar Pichai, would usually answer the top-voted questions, Business Insider reported.
But the process changed in April, and several anonymous employees told BI that the new system only doles out softball questions.
Google replaced Dory with a new AI-based system dubbed Ask, which brings together several questions and summarizes them. And although employees can still see the questions being summarized, they can only upvote the AI-summarized versions which company leaders then respond to. These summaries often take the bite out of the underlying questions, Google employees told BI, softening them in a way that makes the questions more comfortable for company leaders to answer, they said.
"They're just trying to dodge damaging context and questions from being seen by a larger audience and avoid engaging with any specifics asked in one particular question," one Google employee told BI.
A Google spokesperson told Fortune that the new Ask tool was not softening questions but rather summarizing in part to help avoid repetitiveness and improve efficiency. Executives are still facing direct questions on tough issues, the spokesperson added. The new tool is still in an experimental phase and the company will take into account employee feedback, the spokesperson said.
Still, the rephrased questions compiled by Ask make the once lively TGIF meetings less interesting, another employee said. Some of the employees said that the meetings are increasingly pointless and several of them said they rarely attend or ask questions.
The TGIF staff meetings are a symbol of transparency at Google, where management and employees speak frankly about the company’s direction. They used to take place once a week, but later they were cut down to every other week. Finally, in 2019 Google CEO Pichai cut the meetings down to once a month and said they would be focused “on product and business strategy,” following a wave of employee activism.
The new AI-based Ask system for the company-wide meetings was created in part because employees wanted to address more questions across a broader set of topics more efficiently, according to the Google spokesperson. In 2023, before Ask was introduced, fewer than 1% of Google employees asked a question during TGIF meetings, according to the spokesperson. Since Ask was introduced earlier this year, twice as many employees are posing questions and voting on them, the spokesperson added.
Despite the changes to the TGIF meetings, one employee told BI that the phrasing of the questions posed to company leaders didn’t matter anyway.
"Execs have been dodging questions or giving very vague answers at TGIF for years now,” the employee said.
