AI to the Rescue? Not Really: My Afternoon Lost in Google

Find and solve pain points, not just hawk cool tech.

A short field note from the front lines of “innovation.”

Sometimes the universe delivers perfect metaphors wrapped in corporate incompetence. Last week, I experienced a masterclass in how even the most technologically advanced companies can fumble the basics so spectacularly that it borders on performance art.

I was invited to a Google Cloud seminar. Full disclosure: I’m an Azure user, and while I wouldn’t call it a love affair, it gets the job done. But I’m not religious about cloud providers, so when Google sent a personalized invite, I figured I’d listen to their pitch.

The seminar had already started when I arrived, running late due to back-to-back meetings already scheduled. You’d think a company targeting entrepreneurs and startup founders might understand that people with active businesses have calendar conflicts. Hell, they could have checked my Google Calendar if their systems bothered to integrate with their own products. But here’s where things got beautifully absurd.

Despite having a personalized invitation from Google, the security guard wouldn’t let me in. Not because I was disruptive or suspicious, but because he literally had no way to verify I belonged there. No access to the invite list. No ability to contact anyone upstairs. No system for handling this most basic of corporate scenarios. Google’s personalized invite? Nope.

Think about that for a moment. This is Google, a company that can index the entire internet, serve billions of search queries daily, and claims to be building the future of AI. Yet they can’t figure out how to get an invited guest past the lobby. A simple QR code system? A text to someone upstairs? Call? Apparently, rocket science compared to whatever Byzantine process they’d implemented.

I wasn’t heartbroken. Getting sold cloud services I didn’t particularly want wasn’t exactly ruining my day, so I left.

But the universe wasn’t done with its lesson.

Walking out of Google headquarters, I summoned a Waymo (Google’s autonomous vehicle that represents their billion-dollar bet on the future of transportation). Surely this would be the redemptive moment where their technology prowess shines through.

The robo-taxi picked me up two blocks away.

Let me repeat that: Google’s self-driving car couldn’t find a person standing directly in front of Google’s own headquarters. I was clearly marked on their map, at their own address, and the algorithmic brain that’s supposed to navigate the complexities of city traffic couldn’t close the gap on two city blocks.

I found myself wandering around an unfamiliar neighborhood (part of why I’d summoned an autonomous vehicle in the first place) looking for a Google robot that couldn’t find me at the most Google-centric location possible.

Two strikes. Three if you count their dark patterns that make it nearly impossible for paying advertising customers to actually reach a human when things go wrong. Four if you include their credit card capture policies that treat customer payment information like digital roach motels: easy to check in, impossible to check out.

Here’s what’s fascinating about this double feature of dysfunction: it perfectly encapsulates how innovation leaders lose their way. Google has built genuinely foundational AI technology. Their research papers move entire industries. Their computational infrastructure is impressive by any standard.

But somewhere between changing the world and running a business, they forgot about the basics. Customer service becomes an afterthought. User experience gets buried under growth metrics. The human elements that make technology actually useful get optimized away in favor of scalable systems that, ironically, don’t scale to handle basic edge cases.

The security guard couldn’t help me not because he was incompetent but because Google had designed a system that left him powerless. The Waymo couldn’t find me not because the AI was fundamentally broken, but because someone decided two blocks was “close enough” for a pickup.

When companies get this big, this successful, this convinced of their own technological superiority, they start solving for the algorithm instead of the human. They build systems that work perfectly in theory and fail spectacularly in practice.

Google’s robo-taxi couldn’t find its way to me, just like Google itself seems to have lost its way to its customers. The metaphor writes itself.