Google CEO Sundar Pichai laid out his clearest vision yet for how search evolves into agent orchestration. In a recent interview covered by Search Engine Journal on April 10, Pichai stated that information-seeking queries will shift to autonomous task execution with multiple AI agents operating simultaneously.
“If I fast forward, a lot of what are just information seeking queries will be agentic search. You will be completing tasks, you have many threads running,” Pichai said.
From Results to Orchestration
Asked whether search will exist in ten years, Pichai reframed the question entirely: “Search would be an agent manager, right, in which you’re doing a lot of things.”
He referenced Google’s own products as proof the shift is already underway: “I use anti-gravity today, and you have a bunch of agents doing stuff. And I can see search doing versions of those things, and you’re getting a bunch of stuff done.”
The model Pichai described replaces the traditional search paradigm of query-in, ranked-results-out with an orchestration layer. Users issue tasks. Multiple agents execute those tasks in parallel. The search product coordinates the agents rather than returning links.
The Timeline Question
When pressed on what the search paradigm looks like in five or ten years, Pichai declined to speculate, citing the pace of change: “The form factor of devices are going to change. I/O is going to radically change. I think you can paralyze yourself thinking ten years ahead.”
Instead, he argued the curve is steep enough that planning one year out is the right frame: “The models are going to be dramatically different in a year’s time.”
He also pushed back on zero-sum framing between traditional search and AI: “The more you view it as a zero-sum game, it looks difficult. It can become a zero-sum game if you’re innovating or the product is not evolving.”
What This Signals for Agent Builders
Pichai’s comments land at a specific moment. Perplexity reported reaching $450 million ARR on April 11, driven by its pivot from AI search to agentic workflows. Google’s own AI Mode has been shown to produce a 93% zero-click rate on AI-answered queries, according to SEO analysis (though that specific statistic has not been independently verified with a primary source).
The strategic implication is direct: the CEO of the company that controls the dominant search distribution channel is explicitly saying that channel will become agent-mediated. Any developer building agent workflows that currently rely on search API calls will need to understand what Google’s agentic search layer looks like when it arrives.
Pichai notably mentioned “deep research queries” already happening in AI Mode, describing them as tasks that “don’t quite fit the definition” of traditional search but that “people adapted to.” He predicted the next step is “long-running tasks” that operate asynchronously, which describes something closer to an agent orchestration platform than a search engine.