Alphabet reported its second quarter earnings earlier this week, and as usual, the numbers were great. And beat Wall Street’s expectations. But diving into Alphabet’s numbers for the quarter, it’s easy to see how AI is important to Alphabet and how it is also getting a bigger role in Alphabet’s revenue. If you take a look at Alphabet’s “Other Bets”, you’ll see that it brought in $3 billion in revenue for the quarter. That’s up 42% year over year, and that includes most of Alphabet’s other products like its cloud computing and storage services, YouTube Red, and much more. And it shows just how big AI is getting for Alphabet.
“Other Bets” does include the Google Assistant, which is Google’s most popular AI-driven product out there right now, but there are other products that Google has available with AI included, which includes its cloud computing services. Artificial Intelligence is said to be a pretty important part of the future for Google and other tech companies. It has helped Google build a better personal assistant in the Google Assistant, and it is always improving as well. There’s also Google Lens which the company announced at Google I/O earlier this year and expects to launch in the fourth quarter of this year, which is also heavy on artificial intelligence. These products don’t really generate Google much money – although that’s soon to change – but it does get more users using its services, which does bring them some money, and that is through ads. Since ads is still a huge part of Google’s revenue, it’s over 90% to be exact, anything Google does, is to get more ads in your face.
Alphabet did bring in a whopping $26 billion in revenue for the quarter, which was also a huge jump over the previous quarter, and it seems like Alphabet just continues to keep jumping in revenue and profit. Obviously that’s good for Alphabet and its investors, but when will the growth end. Alphabet is continually competing with Apple to be the world’s most valuable company, repeatedly swapping positions on the stock market. Both of them beat out Exxon Mobile a few years ago for that top spot.