Alphabet won’t talk about the Google-Apple AI deal, even to investors

Alphabet declined to answer one of its investors’ questions about Google’s AI deal with Apple during Wednesday’s fourth-quarter earnings call. Instead of responding to an analyst’s question about how the tech giant feels about AI partnerships, such as the one with Apple to enable AI for Siri, the question was completely ignored.

However, that decision tells us something: Alphabet is not yet ready to talk about the impact of this partnership on its core businesses, which are increasingly focused on AI.

Over the years, the relationship between Google and Apple has been mutually beneficial. The two companies’ search partnership saw the search giant pay the iPhone maker $20 billion to be the default search engine on Apple devices, according to documents from the Justice Department’s lawsuit against the search giant. In turn, Google gained access to Apple’s massive customer base: the iPhone maker last quarter announced it has 2.5 billion active devices worldwide, to give you an idea of ​​scale.

The latest Apple AI deal is Rumor has it that Apple will cost around $1 billion per yearbut the further payoff for Google is not as immediately apparent as with search. In Google Search, consumers see links to advertisers’ websites at the top of their search results. AI mode ads, which could one day represent the future of Google’s search business, are still an “experiment” for now.

The company first announced last May that it would serve ads in AI mode, the chatbot-like interface for Google Search, but these tests see the ads placed below or integrated into the chatbot’s responses. Google is also trying out agentic shopping, including Shop with AI Mode, to guide consumers with product-related questions to a seamless checkout experience from the AI ​​interface.

Meanwhile, Google’s AI competitor Anthropic is focusing on ad-supported AI the upcoming Super Bowl ad, which challenges the business model adopted by ChatGPT maker OpenAI and Google.

How all this will play out in the longer term is still an open question – and for today apparently an unanswered question.

Overall, the Apple Siri deal was barely mentioned during Alphabet’s earnings call on Wednesday. Sundar Pichai only noted that he was happy to be Apple’s “cloud provider of choice” and help develop “the next generation of Apple foundation models based on Gemini technology.” Google’s Chief Business Officer Philipp Schindler used the exact same wording when he mentioned Apple.