Google’s Liz Reid, VP of Search:
“One of the interesting things about the evolution of AI is that people stop talking just in keyword ease as much, and they start expressing more of what they want, and then that becomes much easier for us to give an answer. If you say, tell me about someone versus what’s new with someone, that’s actually much easier for us to figure out how to give better results than if all we just say is someone. We used to talk about an example query in a different way is falafel.
What do you want to know with falafel? Some people don’t know what falafel is, they want a definition. Some people want recipes.
Some people want to find where to eat. Some people want nutritional information. They all just use the word falafel, and that’s just harder to figure out how across all of them do that.”
From Odd Lots: Google’s Liz Reid on Who Will Own Search in a World of AI, Apr 23, 2026
That’s jobs to be done! Take something that someone said, and figure out the why and progress they want to make in their life. This whole section of the podcast is good because it’s about the idea of translation.
In the case of Google, it’s about a computer translating what progress a person wants to make. But that’s the whole idea of JTBD.
May the fourth be with you.
The Waiter's Pad 