Alphabet Inc.

Welcome, everyone. Thank you for standing by for the Alphabet first quarter 2024 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Jim Friedland, Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Alphabet's first quarter 2024 earnings conference call. With us today are Sundar Pichai, Philip Schindler, and Ruth Peratt. Now, I'll quickly cover the safe harbor. Some of the statements that we make today regarding our business, operations, and financial performance may be considered forward-looking. Such statements are based on current expectations and assumptions that are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties. Actual results could differ materially. Please refer to our forms 10-K and 10-Q, including the risk factors. We undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statement. During this call, we will present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of non-GAAP to GAAP measures is included in today's earnings press release, which is distributed and available to the public through our investor relations website located at abc.xyz forward slash investor. Our comments will be on year-over-year comparisons unless we state otherwise. And now I'll turn the call over to Sundar.

Thank you, Jim, and hello, everyone. It was a great quarter led by strong performance from Search, YouTube, and Cloud. Today, I want to share how we are thinking about the business and the opportunity more broadly. Of course, that's heavily focused on AI and Search. Then I'll take you through some highlights from the quarter in Cloud, YouTube, and beyond. Let's discuss our momentum and strategy. Taking a step back, it took Google more than 15 years to reach $100 billion in annual revenue. In just the last six years, we've gone from $100 billion to more than $300 billion in annual revenue. Of course, Search continues to power that, as you see in our Q1 results. But in addition, we expect YouTube overall and cloud to exit 2024 at a combined annual run rate of over $100 billion. This shows our track record of investing in and building successful new growing businesses. Now let's look at how well we are positioned for the next wave of AI innovation and the opportunity ahead. There are six points to make. One, research leadership. Two, infrastructure leadership. Three, innovation and search. Four, our global product footprint. Five, velocity in execution. Six, monetization paths. First, our foundation of research leadership. We've been an AI-first company since 2016, pioneering many of the modern breakthroughs that power AI progress for us and for the industry. Last week, we further consolidated teams that build AI models under Google DeepMind. This will help simplify development and establish a single access point for our product teams as they build generative AI applications with these models. The teams are making rapid progress developing Gemini and other models. In February, we rolled out Gemini 1.5 Pro, which shows dramatic performance enhancements across a number of dimensions. It includes a breakthrough in long context understanding, achieving the longest context window of any large-scale foundation model yet. Combining this with Gemini's native multimodal understanding across audio, video, text, code, and more, it's highly capable. We are already seeing developers and enterprise customers enthusiastically embrace Gemini 1.5 and use it for a wide range of things. Beyond Gemini, we have built other useful models, including our Gemma open models, as well as imagine visual models and others. Second, infrastructure leadership. We have the best infrastructure for the AI era. Building world-leading infrastructure is in our DNA starting in our earliest days when we had to design purpose-built hardware to power search. Our data centers are some of the most high-performing, secure, reliable, and efficient in the world. They've been purpose-built for training cutting-edge AI models and designed to achieve unprecedented improvements in efficiency. We have developed new AI models and algorithms that are more than 100 times more efficient than they were 18 months ago. Our custom TPUs, now in their fifth generation, are powering the next generation of ambitious AI projects. Gemini was trained on and is served using TPUs. We are committed to making the investments required to keep us at the leading edge in technical infrastructure. You can see that from the increases in our capital expenditures. This will fuel growth in cloud, help us push the frontiers of AI models, and enable innovation across our services, especially in search. AI innovations in search are the third and perhaps the most important point I want to make. We have been through technology shifts before, to the web, to mobile, and even to voice technology. Each shift expanded what people can do with search and led to new growth. We are seeing a similar shift happening now with generative AI. For nearly a year, we've been experimenting with SGE in search labs across a wide range of queries. And now we are starting to bring AI overviews to the main search results page. We are being measured in how we do this, focusing on areas where GenAI can improve the search experience while also prioritizing traffic to websites and merchants. We have already served billions of queries with our generative AI features. It's enabling people to access new information, to ask questions in new ways, and to ask more complex questions. Most notably, based on our testing, we are encouraged that we are seeing an increase in search usage among people who use the new AI overviews, as well as increased user satisfaction with the results. And with Circle to Search, people can now circle what they see on their Android screens, ask a question about an image or object in a video, and get an AI overview with Lens. Fourth, our global product footprint beyond search. We have six products with more than 2 billion monthly users, including 3 billion Android devices. 15 products have half a billion users, and we operate across 100-plus countries. This gives us a lot of opportunities to bring helpful Gen AI features and multimodal capabilities to people everywhere and improve their experiences. We have brought many new AI features to Pixel, Photos, Chrome, Messages, and more. We are also pleased with the progress we are seeing with Gemini and Gemini Advanced through the Gemini app on Android and the Google app on iOS. Fifth, improved velocity and execution. We've been really focused on simplifying our structures to help us move faster. In addition to bringing together our model building teams under Google DeepMind, we recently unified our ML infrastructure and ML developer teams to enable faster decisions, smarter compute allocation, and a better customer experience. Earlier this year, we brought our search teams together under one leader. And last week, we took another step bringing together our platforms and devices teams. The new combined team will focus on delivering high quality products and experiences, bolstering the Android and Chrome ecosystems, and bringing our best innovations to partners faster. We also remain focused on long-term efforts to durably re-engineer our cost base. You can see the impact of this work reflected in our operating margin improvement. We continue to manage our headcount growth and align teams with our highest priority areas. This speeds up decision making, reduces layers, and enables us to invest in the right areas. Beyond our teams, we are very focused on cost structures, procurement, and efficiency. And a number of technical breakthroughs are enhancing machine speed and efficiency, including the new family of Gemini models and a new generation of TPUs. For example, since introducing SGE about a year ago, machine costs associated with SGE responses have decreased 80% from when first introduced in labs driven by hardware, engineering, and technical breakthroughs. We remain committed to all of this work. Finally, our monetization path. We have clear paths to AI monetization through ads and cloud, as well as subscriptions. Philip will talk more about new AI features that are helping advertisers, including bringing Gemini models into Performance Max. Our cloud business continues to grow as we bring the best of Google AI to enterprise customers and organizations around the world. And Google One now has crossed 100 million paid subscribers, and in Q1, we introduced a new AI premium plan with Gemini Advanced. Okay, those are the six points, so now let me turn to quarterly highlights from Cloud and YouTube in a bit more detail. In Cloud, we have announced more than 1,000 new products and features over the past eight months. At Google Cloud Next, more than 300 customers and partners spoke about their generative AI successes with Google Cloud, including global brands like Bayer, CentOS, Mercedes-Benz, Walmart, and many more. Our differentiation in cloud begins with our AI hypercomputer, which provides efficient and cost-effective infrastructure to train and serve models. Today, more than 60% of funded GenAI startups and nearly 90% of GenAI unicorns are Google Cloud customers. And customers like PayPal and Kakao Brain are choosing our infrastructure. We offer an industry-leading portfolio of NVIDIA GPUs along with our TPUs. This includes TPU V5P, which is now generally available, and NVIDIA's latest generation of Blackwell GPUs. We also announced Axion, our new Google-designed and ARM-based CPU. In benchmark testing, it has performed up to 50% better than compatible x86-based systems. On top of our infrastructure, we offer more than 130 models, including our own models, open source models, and third-party models. We made Gemini 1.5 Pro available to customers as well as Imagine 2.0 at Cloud Next. And we shared that more than 1 million developers are now using our generative AI across tools, including AI Studio and Vertex AI. We spoke about how customers like Bristol-Myers Squibb and Etsy can quickly and easily build agents and connect them to their existing systems. For example, Discover Financial has begun deploying GenAI-driven tools to its nearly 10,000 call center agents to achieve faster resolution times for customers. Customers can also now ground their GenAI with Google Search and their own data from their enterprise databases and applications. In Workspace, we announced that organizations like Uber, Pepperdine University, and PennyMac are using Gemini in Google Workspace, our AI-powered agent that's built right into Gmail, Docs, Sheets, and more. We also announced Google Vids, a new application to create stories in short video format. And we introduced Gemini for meetings and messaging and Gemini Security for Workspace. Customers are choosing Workspace because they have deep trust in our powerful security and privacy features. Our cloud business is now widely seen as the leader in cybersecurity. I saw this firsthand when I went to the Munich Security Conference in February. Cybersecurity analysts are using Gemini to help spot threats, summarize intelligence, and take action against attacks, helping companies like American Family Insurance aggregate and analyze security data in seconds instead of days. turning next to YouTube, which continues to grow and lead in streaming. We announced that on average, viewers are watching over 1 billion hours of YouTube content on TVs daily. AI experiments like DreamScreen will give anyone the ability to make AI-generated backgrounds for YouTube shots. And on subscriptions, which are increasingly important for YouTube, we announced that in Q1, YouTube surpassed 100 million music and premium subscribers globally, including trialers. And YouTube TV now has more than 8 million paid subscribers. Finally, in other bets, Waymo's fully autonomous service continues to grow ridership in San Francisco and Phoenix with high customer satisfaction, and we started offering paid rides in Los Angeles and testing rider-only trips in Austin. Overall, it was a great quarter, and there's more to come. I.O. is in less than three weeks, followed by Brandcast and Google Marketing Live. I want to thank our employees around the world who are at the heart of this progress and who continue to focus on building innovative products, helpful services, and new opportunities for businesses and partners around the world. Thank you. Philip.