# Google's AI shake-up: 3 things Gemini needs > Source: > Published: 2026-08-06 01:31:52+00:00 The frontier lab that pioneered the current AI revolution just had its biggest reset ever as it plays catch-up with its younger rivals. On Wednesday, Google DeepMind announced significant leadership changes as OpenAI and Anthropic lap the company in advanced models and agents. For one, [elevated](https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/message-ceo/next-chapter-ai-momentum/) its chief AI architect [Koray Kavukcuoglu](https://www.linkedin.com/in/koray-kavukcuoglu-0439a720/) to SVP of Google DeepMind, reporting directly to CEO Sundar Pichai. Demis Hassabis has been shifted from CEO to chairman of DeepMind and chief scientist of Alphabet, focusing on AGI and scientific discovery. Finally, Google DeepMind's other most influential leader, Jeff Dean, is leaving Google entirely to launch a new startup called Discovery Loop. After briefly taking the AI world by storm last fall with the launch of Gemini 3, Google has [struggled to launch Gemini 3.5 Pro](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-16/google-gemini-launch-delayed-as-tech-falls-short-of-internal-goals) while ChatGPT, Claude, and Chinese models have rolled out major advances on a regular cadence. And just as challenging, Google hasn't kept pace with the agentic coding tools that have defined the AI industry in 2026. It's a sobering moment for the company that created the transformer technology at the heart of generative AI and that has all the compute, cloud resources, and talent to compete with any frontier lab on the planet. If Google is ready to shake things up, here are three places to start: **Show us its answer to Claude Code**: Nothing has defined the AI movement in 2026 more than Anthropic's Claude Code, the coding agent that's more agent than coding tool. Even though OpenAI's Codex has caught and even surpassed it in many ways, Claude Code and OpenClaw are the icons of the agentic moment. Google has Gemini CLI and Antigravity, but the fact that they are two different brands that do the same thing as Claude Code is part of the problem.**Clarify the brands**: Google uses so many different brands for its AI products that it's impossible to keep track of them all, even for someone who does nothing but track AI companies for a living. Beyond just Gemini, there's Gemma, Genie, Antigravity, Google AI Studio, Firebase Studio, Opal, Nano Banana, Flow, Lyria, and Veo. It's bananas. Google needs to stop "shipping the org chart," as the saying goes in the tech industry ([Conway's Law](https://www.atlassian.com/blog/teamwork/what-is-conways-law-acmi)).**Become more like Copilot**: I'm sure this one will sting for the Google team since Microsoft is to Google as Google is to OpenAI and OpenAI is to Anthropic: the rival that defined the company's early days. But while Microsoft trails Google, let alone OpenAI and Anthropic, in models and agent harnesses, it is winning in AI in two ways. It has made Copilot[easy and ubiquitous to access](https://www.thedeepview.com/articles/why-microsoft-is-winning-ai-without-the-best-model)across all of its popular productivity products and it has made the Copilot brand universal so that every user knows what it is. ## Our Deeper *View* Google still has all the elements to be a key player in the next stage of AI. And beyond that, it has other assets that position it to make a unique impact. First, it has the Google Workspace and Android platforms that give it a captive audience similar to Microsoft's position with Windows and Microsoft 365. But perhaps most of all, it has Google Research with its deep foundations in science and original research to power future breakthroughs. The past six months has simply exposed that Google appears to be operating much more like a lumbering tech giant than a scrappy startup innovating like its existence depends on the next breakthrough. That's where OpenAI, Anthropic, the Chinese upstarts, and the neolabs operate everyday. And Google will also need to restore that kind of urgency and mentality to get back its mojo.