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People love the bright and shiny new object — especially in tech. But when asked to identify the breakthrough technology today that everyone will be talking about in 10 years, Ruth Porat went old school.

“The next big thing starts with search,” she said.

Porat would know. She isn’t just president of Google’s corporate parent Alphabet. She’s also the holding company’s chief investment officer. And the search engine is more relevant than ever in the AI era, she told the 500 business, government and academic leaders gathered at the 2025 SIEPR Economic Summit.

“Google started as ‘10 blue links’ and then evolved to tech search, then to voice search, and now multimodal search,” Porat said. Now the focus is on Google’s AI Overview, the automatically generated summaries that sit atop search results, which Porat said will become increasingly “agentic” (tech speak for human-like) in ways that she suggested will shock and awe users.

But AI’s disruption is about more than autonomous chatbots and richer, deeper search queries. “It’s about a radical rethink of ‘What is your business?’” Porat said, noting that one estimate pegs $4 trillion as the annual amount AI products and services could add to U.S. GDP by 2030.

Calling AI “the greatest source of vulnerability” for business models, Porat urged company leaders to prioritize research and development of AI innovations, use data and analytics to make sure investments are paying off, and be prepared to pivot. “You can’t drive a car with mud on the windshield,” she said, drawing from her experience as an adviser to the U.S. Treasury Department during the 2008 financial crisis — when it became apparent that large companies didn’t fully understand what was happening in their businesses.

“You do not want to be the one that’s waking up too late and realizing that you’re behind in your industry,” Porat said. “There’s an overused expression [that is meaningful nonetheless]: ‘You’re not going to lose to AI; you’re going to lose to the person who is using AI.’”

Two other “breakthrough” technologies that Porat says are high on Alphabet’s priority list: self-driving cars — and their potential to save lives — and cloud services, which are becoming ever-more critical to operations in the public and private sectors.

A warning to U.S. policymakers

Energy supply, or the lack thereof, is a potential bottleneck to realizing AI’s economic potential, Porat acknowledged during her featured Summit conversation with SIEPR Advisory Board member Ansaf Kareem of Latitude Capital. “There’s been an underinvestment in the [power] grid for the last two decades,” she said. So there’s an urgent need now, she added, both to “optimize” existing capacity and to do “some very important work around additional sources of energy.”

Another area of concern, Porat said, are the export controls instituted under the “AI Diffusion Rule” in the final days of the Biden administration that limit exports of advanced semiconductor chips to certain countries, including Switzerland and Israel, in the name of national security. Porat called the rule “befuddling” and warned that, together with China’s turbocharged advances in AI, that it could undermine America’s lead in the technology.

Countries recognize AI’s potential to transform education, health care, agriculture, and other systems for the better, Porat said, and “they will find an alternative approach” if they are blocked from U.S. technology.

If there’s one lesson “anyone sitting in Silicon Valley knows,” she said in reflecting on AI competition with China, it’s this: “Leadership can never be taken for granted.”

Highlights of the 2025 SIEPR Economic Summit

Photos by Ryan Zhang.