Three years ago, I wrote that Google had too many peacetime generals.
The argument was not mine alone. It came from Praveen Seshadri's essay on life inside the company. Google had 175,000 capable, well-compensated people trapped in a maze of approvals, launch processes, legal reviews, exec reviews, OKRs, and reorgs of reorgs.
No mission.
No urgency.
A collective delusion of exceptionalism. A soft culture where nothing was worth fighting for.
An environment where what to order at some of the best food in Silicon Valley at Google campus cafés was the biggest decision of the day.
I was rooting for them anyway. I wrote that I trusted they could bring on some wartime generals.
And they did.
The announcement at I/O 2026 is what that looks like.
On May 19, Google did not announce a product. It announced a posture.
Two new models, Gemini Omni and Gemini 3.5 Flash.
An agent-first development platform in Antigravity. Information agents in Search. Gemini Spark and Daily Brief in the Gemini app. A Universal Cart built for agentic commerce. Intelligent eyewear shipping this fall.
The framing throughout was not "here is a better tool." It was "now anyone can be a builder." That is mission language. That is urgency. That is a company that has decided what it is fighting for.
The context makes the turn sharper.
A year ago, Google was the cautionary tale of the AI race, the incumbent that invented the transformer and then watched a startup commercialize it. That story has flipped. By app-tracker data from Apptopia, ChatGPT's app market share fell from roughly 69% in early 2025 to about 45% in 2026, while Gemini's climbed from under 15% to about 25%. The pressure on the former leader became acute enough that OpenAI's Sam Altman declared an eight-week "code red" in December, urging staff to refocus on core products.
The peacetime general does not call a code red. The wartime general does.
For executives, the temptation is to read this as a tech story. It is not. It is a case study in how a large, slow, internally focused organization changes its posture, and how fast the outside world re-rates it when it does. Every incumbent you compete with, advise, or sit on the board of is somewhere on the same curve.
Three things this means for global executives:
First, culture change is a communications event before it is an operational one. Google's announcements worked because they were legible. The market understood the story within hours: lagging to leading, peacetime to wartime. Most companies undergoing a genuine turnaround fail to tell that story clearly, so the change happens internally, and the re-rating never comes. If your organization is changing and your stakeholders cannot describe how, you have done the hard half and skipped the half that pays.
Second, "agentic" is about to become a board-level term, and you should not let your competitors define it for you. Gartner has projected that by 2026, 40% of enterprise applications will embed task-specific AI agents that pursue goals and take actions on behalf of users. That shifts the advantage toward whoever controls distribution and ecosystem access, which is exactly the ground Google just claimed. The strategic question for your company is not whether to adopt agents. It is which platform's agents will sit between you and your customers, and what that does to the relationship you thought you owned.
Third, competing on price is the quiet headline. Gemini 3.5 Flash was pitched at a competitive enterprise cost, a direct move against OpenAI and Anthropic on price. When a dominant distributor decides to compete on cost, margins across the category compress. If your planning assumes today's pricing for AI capability holds, rebuild the model. Assume it falls.
The Caracal Global scope
Tariff volatility. Supply chain disruption. NATO realignment. Increased China competition. AI governance. Export controls. Energy transition. Interest rate uncertainty.
These aren't background noise.
These events are reshaping how your company is understood by the audiences that matter most: boards, investors, employees, customers, regulators, journalists, and the broader public.
The world has changed. The way your company explains itself has not.
Most companies treat communications as the function that explains decisions after they are made. The companies winning in this environment treat communications as the function that shapes how decisions are understood, before, during, and after.
Google spent three years being misunderstood. It took one keynote, told clearly, to change the story. That is not a lesson about AI. That is a lesson about communications.
I'm still rooting for Google. The difference is that in 2023, I was hoping they would find their wartime generals. In 2026, the question for the rest of corporate America is whether you can recognize yours, and whether anyone outside your walls can tell.
Enjoy the ride + plan accordingly.
-Marc
You can always reach me @ marc@caracal.global.
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Caracal Global is your communications partner for global business, at the intersection of commerce and governments. We monitor geopolitical signals daily: tariff announcements, military movements, policy shifts, trade negotiations, export control changes, and competitive positioning. We translate those signals into messages that your boards, investors, employees, customers, regulators, and the broader public understand.
Geopolitics + Communications. Intelligence, Strategy, and Communications for Fortune 1,000 companies, private equity portfolio firms, and founder-led businesses operating in an environment of permanent disruption. Detroit-born, with deep roots in the Global Great Lakes region. Active in Washington, DC, and London.
Most companies treat communications as the function that explains decisions after they are made. We treat it as the function that shapes how decisions are understood, before, during, and after.
Caracal Global is your Chief Communications Strategist.
Always Be Communicating.
Learn more at caracal.global.
