By Abhik Sengupta: After a rushed Bard launch, Google CEO Sundar Pichai is trying to restore faith in its ChatGPT rival, at least among colleagues. In an email, accessed by CNBC, Pichai says that the workers must test the AI-powered chatbot as ChatGPT’s popularity and potential business continues to grow rapidly. The email comes a week after Google unveiled its own AI chatbot Bard its early demo offered incorrect answers. Following the demo, Google’s stock fell substantially, leaving Google’s stakeholders and investors frantic.

Pichai has also asked employees to spend two to four hours of their time on Bard to improve its tech. The company will reportedly send a detailed plan next week. He reminded staffers that Google has not always been the first to release a product, but that hasn’t hampered its ability to win.

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In the company-wide email, Pichai reportedly said that this is an « uncomfortably exciting » moment, referring to Bard’s launch mishap. The letter also notes, « I know this moment is uncomfortably exciting, and that’s to be expected: the underlying technology is evolving rapidly with so much potential… Some of our most successful products were not first to market. They gained momentum because they solved important user needs and were built on deep technical insights. »

Google was referring to its dominant position in the search market. In the early 2000s, several search engines existed in the market, but Google now has 90 per cent of the market. It is also not the pioneer of Android, though it purchased it at an early stage. At that time, the market was dominated by Blackberry and Nokia custom OS (operating systems), but today, Android has the largest mobile OS market share.

In the email, Pichai reportedly remained optimistic and said that AI has « gone through many winters and springs », adding that the « most important thing we can do right now is to focus on building a great product and developing it responsibly. »

Following Google Bard’s patchy launch last week, Google employees called the rollout rushed and botched. Google was feeling massive pressure from Microsoft, which is leveraging OpenAI’s new-gen ChatGPT technology into its Bing search engine and Edge browser.

Google has said that it will also include Bard’s underlying technology LaMDA in Google Search. It will essentially let users search for queries and get results based on SEO optimisation. Additionally, it will also have a separate chatbox to include conversational results based on web results.

This essentially means that Google will offer the existing way of displaying results. Microsoft is also deploying a similar strategy with Bing and Edge.