Here's how I'd fix Google's AI branding if I were CEO for a day

Ever since it was renamed from Bard (I won’t hold it against you if you forgot), Gemini has gone from an intelligent chatbot to a command center that powers every AI feature on your Android phone. Its immensely expanded scope means you can find it answering questions everywhere from YouTube and Maps to enterprise Workspace apps. You will find at least one Gemini-powered feature inside every single app that Google makes, across mobile and desktop.

And for some reason, Google is taking a page out of Apple’s book and naming every single one of its gazillion AI features it keeps dropping every couple of weeks. They were still easy to track when there were just a handful of them, but it’s now getting so out of hand that I feel like that meme of a lady with a bunch of incomprehensible math equations floating around.

Why does everything need a name?

It’s famously an Apple thing to name every little new trinket. Think of Retina Display, AirPlay, Dynamic Island, et al. Google has been copying it too for a little while — we’ve seen that with Magic Eraser turning into Magic Editor and that into Magic Capture with the Pixel 11.

These monikers are great marketers for the brand, sure. You just Google the names, and you will find the exact match instantly. On the other hand, using generic descriptors for them undermines the brand’s ability to show generational progress. Like going from Magic Eraser to Magic Editor shows there’s something new rather than having to explain the generative AI leap.

But while making things easier for itself, Google has made the task much more difficult for me, both as a user and a journalist. Instead of just telling you Gemini does Y, I must add its marketing fluff and say something like, “Gemini has this new feature called X that does Y.” Not to forget, as a user, I have to keep track of what Google keeps announcing in order to find the feature and use it.

The naming structure Google is blindly adopting across the board may have worked for other features across Android, but forcing it on something as encompassing as AI feels unnecessary and cognitively hamstrung.

AI is more than a single app

Artificial Intelligence has moved on from its chatbot era and has turned into an overarching intelligence layer that can handle multiple kinds of tasks. It has a more psychological standing than any of the other individual tools you have discussed above, and I think Google isn’t banking on it enough.

You can query AI on anything under the sun in natural language, and it will serve you answers in a similarly easy-to-understand fashion. That is the most basic premise of AI that is generally understood. When using any of the hundred AI features on Android, users already understand that Gemini is running under the hood, using all its world knowledge and personal context. And it literally is — each of these AI features runs on the Gemini Flash model under the hood.

So, when it surfaces my boarding pass while I’m on a call with the airline or warns me of the things people say I should avoid while travelling, I just need to know that Gemini is helping me out here. I really don’t care if these features are called Magic Cue and Ask Maps — those are redundant. And that’s the exact kind of layered mess I’d clean up if I were put in charge of Google today.

Fret not, Google, Karan is here to the rescue

I take my responsibilities seriously, so I’ll jump straight to business.

I’d begin with merging Gemini Spark with the regular Gemini. I don’t think Spark should exist as a separate product, or even as a separate tab inside Gemini, for that matter. I reckon that Spark-like autonomous AI agents should be the default interface for end users — we should ideally be able to give it a task and just move on without once thinking about keeping the lid open or not. Gemini should proactively decide how to execute a task depending on what is needed.

In the same vein, I’d get rid of the Gemini Live branding as well because it’s simply an input method. If you type to Gemini, it should respond in text, and if you talk to Gemini, it’d respond in voice the way Live does. Simple. And for the case where you prefer voice typing your query and getting a text response in return, that’s really a keyboard job, and Gboard already has such a feature, so we can easily avoid duplication.

As for every other naming mayhem Google has created, it created a solution too; it just forgot to exploit it to the fullest. I’m talking about Gemini Intelligence. While Gemini is the smart AI bot that you chat with as if it were a human assistant, Gemini Intelligence would be the umbrella term that has all of Google’s AI features and capabilities underneath it. It would be a major Settings option under which you’ll find AI tools. That alone would get rid of all the other monikers, including Personal Intelligence, Ask Maps, Proactive Assistance, Take a Message, and a myriad more. If Maps, YouTube, Keep, or whatever other Google app needs an AI button, it would come with the Gemini branding. Plain and simple.

I do have the understanding that taking over Sundar Pichai’s job wouldn’t be straightforward, and I’d need to make some exceptions. Wherever these brandings do make sense, maybe for marketing or internal use, I wouldn’t be as harsh, though I would still strongly oppose inventing new consumer-facing names that users must remember to find and use. I don’t know whether or not this would make me a terrible CEO, but I’m sure my users would be much happier.

Right direction, wrong packaging

If you look at my suggestions, I don’t have an issue with how integrated Gemini is across Google products. In fact, that’s what we expected from Google in the first place, given how intently it’s been running the AI race. But the way it’s packaging the AI features and presenting them to its users leaves a lot to be desired. It’s as if Google paid no regard to how we perceive them as a complete package rather than individual tools spread across the phone.

While Google has superficially replaced the Android branding on the boot screen with Gemini Intelligence, it is yet to fully exploit and materialize the term for end users. It’s too good a title to be reduced to just a splash screen, while its potential to be used as the central control system that powers everything AI on every device that Google touches lies untapped.