图片来源：JASON REDMOND/AFP via Getty Images; CAMILLE COHEN/AFP via Getty Images
本周，科技界两大巨头在相隔一天、相距750英里的两地分别举办了面向开发者群体的大会。尽管微软的Build大会和谷歌的I/O开发者大会均聚焦人工智能，但这两场针锋相对的盛会凸显出，这两家行业巨头正通过截然不同的策略抢占市场。
这两家公司均不遗余力地推进人工智能编码助手的发展，力求达成软件自主构建与测试的目标——微软宣布GitHub Copilot推出全新自主编码功能，谷歌则首次推出Jules编码助手。然而，除编码助手外，双方在重点布局方面的关键差异，折射出其战略路径的根本分歧。
微软正努力说服企业构建人工智能代理
在Build大会上，微软发布的内容更侧重于助力企业客户创建人工智能代理，并为其提供实现工作流自动化的有效工具。其宣传内容涵盖如何让代理调用工具、达成代理间协同合作，以及最为关键的——管控人工智能代理的数据访问权限。这些功能对大型企业和政府机构至关重要。
微软人工智能安全主管内塔·海比（Neta Haiby）在一次或许是无心之失中，凸显了这一点。彼时，一名支持巴勒斯坦的抗议者打断了Build大会上关于人工智能时代安全最佳实践的讨论环节，内塔·海比误将电脑屏幕共享至大会现场直播，从而展示出一条来自微软云业务同事的Teams消息。在这条消息里，该云计算员工透露，使用微软Azure云服务运行诸多人工智能应用的沃尔玛，正打算采用微软新推出的AI网关（此软件层为生成式人工智能应用增强安全性，并提供分析功能）以及全新Entra产品（人工智能代理的身份管理工具），且援引沃尔玛一位人工智能工程师所言：“微软在人工智能安全领域远超谷歌”。这一披露看似意外——沃尔玛尚未公开宣布使用这些微软服务，却巧妙地强化了微软的营销话术。若真是意外，对微软而言无疑是意外之喜。
微软所宣布的即便是更面向消费者的功能，实则也瞄准企业客户。微软首次推出了NLWeb协议，使得任何网站或应用程序都能轻松部署聊天机器人，从而让用户能够以自然语言查询网站内容。这固然能提升消费者的购物与搜索体验，但其初衷在于助力企业增加销售额。
谷歌为消费者和个人创作者而战
这与谷歌在I/O开发者大会上公布的内容形成强烈反差。谷歌宣布的重点几乎完全聚焦于消费者层面，而非大型组织，主要面向个人网络用户与内容创作者。最重磅的消息是谷歌核心搜索产品的全面升级：新增多项人工智能概览功能，可为用户查询提供精简答案，同时推出“人工智能模式”，能带来更原生的人工智能交互体验，与用户使用OpenAI的ChatGPT时所获得的体验相似，该模式运用了谷歌最为强大的人工智能模型。此外，谷歌还推出了能让购物者在选购商品时虚拟试穿服装的新功能。
谷歌发布的其他信息还包括新图像、音频和视频生成式人工智能工具，这些工具不仅面向普通消费者，也适用于社交媒体创作者。鉴于谷歌旗下拥有油管（YouTube），这也在情理之中，因为这些工具能让用户更便捷地生成吸引眼球的内容。
当然，还有一些关于代理人工智能功能的讨论——谷歌将其称为“水手计划”——但这些代理旨在帮助消费者处理具体事务，比如购买体育赛事门票或购买杂货。水手计划旨在打造一款通用型个人助手，而非实现企业工作流程自动化。
在I/O开发者大会上，谷歌重点展示的唯一一款具有企业应用价值的产品是Beam，这是一款能够在视频通话中以3D形式呈现人像的系统。许多公司可能会注册使用Beam，认为它有助于团队远程协作，甚至能提升虚拟销售电话的效率，但它似乎难以成为一款能彻底革新业务的产品。
微软需要技术发挥作用，而谷歌需要技术和新商业模式
Build大会与I/O开发者大会的另一大显著差异在于：微软推出的创新技术与其现有商业模式完美适配，而谷歌的多数发布内容却与自身商业模式显得格格不入。
诚然，微软也面临风险：客户可能认为其推出的各类代理式人工智能产品和功能价值有限，不愿为微软期望收取的高额许可费买单。不过，一旦人工智能代理获得市场认可，它们只会进一步巩固微软现有的云业务和基于订阅的商业模式。
另一方面，谷歌推出人工智能功能无疑是一场豪赌，这可能会直接蚕食其25年以来赖以生存的基于广告的商业模式。搜索业务占据谷歌收入的56%，也是其利润的主要来源。如果像独立研究表明的那样，人工智能概览功能导致用户点击链接的次数减少，或是人工智能模式提供的付费链接数量锐减（目前这一情况似乎已然成真），那么谷歌如何维持营收便成了未知之数。
针对类似聊天机器人的界面以及通用型个人人工智能助手，存在诸多可构想全新商业模式的方式。然而，谷歌尚未明晰其针对这些模式的具体规划——在I/O开发者大会上聆听谷歌高管发言时，便能察觉到这家公司尚未真正找到答案。
至少其发布的图像、视频和音频生成产品有助于为油管提供内容支撑，油管仍拥有稳健的广告驱动型业务。然而，在诸多人工智能功能方面，谷歌目前正尝试转型，着力销售高价订阅服务。它已将每月19.99美元的AI Premium订阅服务更名为Google AI Pro，并向这些订阅用户开放部分新功能。此外，谷歌还推出了面向高级用户的Google AI Ultra订阅服务，每月费用达250美元，这些用户可享谷歌最先进的人工智能功能，且使用量几乎不受限制。
实在难以设想，谷歌能售出足够多的此类订阅服务，以填补因推出人工智能搜索功能而可能带来的广告收入损失。实际上，Ultra级别的订阅费用如此高昂，难以称得上是商业模式，或许仅能勉强覆盖少量付费用户的成本。然而，对于谷歌这般规模的公司来说，这似乎并非一项严肃的业务，充其量只是权宜之计，处于过去谷歌与未来尚未明晰的谷歌之间的一种过渡形态。（毋庸置疑，谷歌是迫于压力才推出这些功能，其逻辑在于：与其坐等OpenAI颠覆自身商业模式，不如主动破局。更多相关内容可参见《财富》杂志记者莎伦·戈德曼的文章。）
正如其I/O开发者大会所表明的，谷歌本质上是一家面向消费者的人工智能公司。尽管订阅模式对消费品牌行之有效——看看网飞（Netflix）或Spotify便知——但每月高达250美元的订阅费，对消费者而言实在难以负担。事实上，即使是这些流媒体公司也发现，要想保持华尔街所要求的增长，就必须其服务中植入广告。归根结底，谷歌必须探索出一条路径，让广告在其快速推动形成的聊天机器人与个人人工智能助手新生态中依旧保持效力。微软面临的挑战虽然艰巨，但相对容易一些：只需设法让技术足够出色，以佐证其服务成本的合理性。
换言之，谷歌不仅要创新技术，还需重塑自身。（财富中文网）
译者：中慧言-王芳
In the span of one day and 750 miles, two of tech’s biggest companies put on conferences for their armies of developers this week. And while both Microsoft’s Build and Google’s I/O conferences were all about AI, the dueling convocations highlighted how the two industry behemoths are each seeking to conquer the market through radically different strategies.
Both companies made a big push into AI coding assistants that can autonomously build and test software—with Microsoft announcing a new autonomous coding feature for GitHub Copilot and Googled debuting its Jules coding agent. But beyond coding agents, some key differences in emphasis pointed at divergent strategies.
Microsoft is battling to convince enterprises to build AI agents
At Build, Microsoft placed a far greater emphasis in its announcements on tools that are designed to help enterprise customers create AI agents and get them to successfully automate workflows. Microsoft’s announcements were about how to allow agents to use tools, get agents to work with other agents, and, critically, to control what data AI agents access. These things matter to big companies and governments.
In an episode that underscored that point, in what may or may not have been an inadvertent slip-up, when a pro-Palestinian protestor interrupted a Build session on security best practices in the age of AI, Neta Haiby, Microsoft’s head of AI security mistakenly shared her computer screen with the Build livestream. In doing so, she revealed a Teams message from one of her colleagues from Microsoft’s cloud business. In it, the cloud employee said that Walmart, which uses many AI applications on Microsoft’s Azure cloud service, was planning to use Microsoft’s newly-announced AI Gateway, which is a software layer that adds security and analytics around generative AI applications, and its new Entra product, which is an identity management tool for AI agents. The employee quoted a Walmart AI engineer as saying that “Microsoft is WAY ahead of Google with AI security.” The disclosure seemed completely accidental—Walmart has not yet announced its use of these Microsoft services—but the fact is it perfectly reinforced Microsoft’s marketing message. If it was an accident, it was a happy one for Microsoft.
Even the more consumer-oriented aspects of what Microsoft announced were aimed at business customers. It debuted a protocol called NLWeb that makes it easy for any website or app to set up a chatbot that will allow a user to query the site in natural language. That will make for a better shopping experience and searching experience for consumers, but the idea here is to help companies drive more sales.
Google is battling for consumers and individual creators
Contrast that to what Google announced at I/O. Here the emphasis was almost entirely on consumers, not large organizations. It was about individual web users and individual content creators. The biggest news was the revamping of Google’s core Search product, with more AI Overviews, which provide capsule answers to queries, and also a new “AI Mode” that provides a more native AI experience, similar to what users get with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, using Google’s most capable AI models. It will also have new features that allow shoppers to virtually try on outfits as they shop.
Other announcements from Google were new image, audio, and video generative AI tools that were aimed at both general consumers and social media creators. This makes sense given Google’s ownership of YouTube, as the tools make it easier for users to generate engaging content.
Sure, there was some talk about agentic AI capabilities—which are being released under what Google is calling Project Mariner—but these were about agents designed to help consumers do things, like purchase tickets to a sporting event, or buy groceries. Project Mariner is about building a universal personal assistant. It is not about automating enterprise workflows.
The only product with real enterprise uses that Google highlighted at I/O was Beam, a system that renders people in 3D in video calls. Many companies will probably sign up for Beam thinking it helps teams collaborate remotely and maybe even makes virtual sales calls more effective, but it hardly seems like something that is going to transform business.
Microsoft needs the tech to work. Google needs that—and a new business model
What was also striking between Build and I/O is how comfortably the innovations Microsoft is announcing sit within the software giant’s existing business model, and how awkwardly much of what Google announced sits within its own.
Sure, Microsoft is taking a risk that its customers won’t find enough value in all the agentic AI products and features it is rolling out to pay the increased license fee that Microsoft wants to charge for it. But, if the AI agents gain traction, they only reinforce its existing cloud business and subscription-based business model.
Google, on the other hand, is taking a big gamble with its rollout of AI features that could directly cannibalize the advertising-based business model on which it has depended for a quarter century. Search represents 56% of Google’s revenues and most of its profits. If people click on fewer links with AI Overviews, as independent studies suggest, or if AI Mode offers far fewer opportunities for paid links, as also seems to be the case, it isn’t clear how Google will maintain its revenues.
There are plenty of ways to imagine new business models for chatbot-like interface and a universal personal AI assistant. But Google has not said yet what it thinks those business models should be—and listening to Google executives speak at I/O one got the sense the company hasn’t really figured it out yet.
At least the image, video, and audio generation products it announced help feed YouTube, which still has a healthy ad-driven business. But for many of its AI features, Google is trying for now to pivot to selling pricey subscriptions. It has renamed its $19.99 per month AI Premium subscription Google AI Pro, and made some of its new features available to those subscribers. And then it has announced a very expensive $250 per month Google AI Ultra subscription for power users who will get access to Google’s most advanced AI capabilities, with few caps on usage.
It’s hard to imagine that Google will be able to sell enough of these subscriptions to replace the ad dollars they are potentially going to lose by rolling out the AI Search features. In fact, the Ultra tier is so expensive it isn’t really a business at all. It might just about cover the costs of those few power users who sign up for it. But it doesn’t seem like a serious business for a company of Google’s scale. It is at best a stop gap measure—a halfway house between the Google of the past, and a future Google whose shape has not yet come into focus. (No doubt Google is under pressure to roll out these features on the theory that it is better to disrupt its own business model, than to let OpenAI disrupt it. More on that here from Fortune’s Sharon Goldman.)
As its I/O conference made clear, Google is essentially a consumer AI company. And while a subscription model can work for consumer brands—just ask Netflix or Spotify—it can’t work for consumers at $250 per month. In fact, even those streaming companies have found that to keep producing the growth Wall Street demands, they’ve had to incorporate advertising into their offerings. Ultimately, Google is going to have to figure out a way to make advertising still work in a new world of chatbots and AI personal assistants it is rapidly ushering into existence. Microsoft’s challenge is daunting but easier: it just has to figure out how to make the tech work well enough to justify its cost to serve.
In other words, Google needs to not only invent the tech, it needs to reinvent itself.