Google trying everything to sell AI to skeptics

If you're a tech company not called Apple Inc., getting regular people to pay attention to your smartphone launch is a challenge.

- Bloomberg

Your executives, who simply must be involved, are stuffy, wooden, and, more often than not, white and old. Even worse, they're not famous.

So what do you do? If you're Google, the answer apparently is: everything. On Wednesday, to promote its new range of AI-enhanced Pixel devices, the Alphabet Inc. unit surely broke the record for celebrity and influencer endorsements packed into a single hour. Expect this to become the norm as stuffy tech companies struggle to explain their artificial-intelligence offerings to an increasingly skeptical public.

This is the other side of the AI race: the effort to gain the attention of those not avidly following tech news to explain what AI actually does and why it's worth paying for. If these tools are ever going to be worth the cost of developing them, they'll need to be used by everyone from your little brother to your grandmother. In Google's case, the task is doubly difficult: It needs to persuade people to switch from their iPhones to the very capable but comparatively deeply unpopular Pixel. "They need to go beyond the techie," said tech analyst Carolina Milanesi of Creative Strategies.