Two billion monthly users now interact with Google through conversational AI instead of traditional keyword searches. Soufi Esmaeilzadeh, Director of Product Management for Google Search, leads the team that transformed how humanity discovers information through AI Overviews and AI mode. In this episode of Lead with AI, Dr. Tamara Nall speaks with Soufi about the query fan out technique that breaks complex questions into subtopics and researches them simultaneously, mimicking how humans naturally reason through problems. Soufi shares how college students navigate career decisions through back-and-forth dialogue with AI mode, how parents plan family vacations by describing nuanced requirements in natural language, and how Search Live allows people to debug appliances simply by pointing their camera and asking questions. She reveals three innovation frontiers reshaping information discovery: agentic capabilities where AI books reservations on your behalf, multi-modal interfaces that understand video and audio inputs, and personalization that remembers your preferences without requiring repetition. For anyone curious about how search evolved beyond blue links and keywords into conversational assistance, Soufi explains what happens when two billion people shift from searching to having conversations.

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