Google just made Gemini unavoidable — but not inevitable

By Alan Jacobson, Systems Architect & Analyst

Google just made a huge mistake.

By adding a Gemini button to the Chrome browser, Google is betting that more exposure will fix AI’s adoption problem. That if AI is everywhere, users will finally embrace it.

But that’s not why adoption has stalled.

And it raises an uncomfortable question: how can Google not know this?

The problem isn’t access. It’s experience

First-time users are not abandoning AI because they can’t find it. They’re abandoning it because their early experiences are bad.

They get confident answers that are wrong.
Summaries that miss the point.
Hallucinations delivered without hesitation or warning.

So they stop trusting it. And then they stop using it.

That’s not a distribution problem. That’s a credibility problem.

If anything, making AI more visible accelerates rejection. When a tool fails after you actively seek it out, you shrug. When it fails after being pushed into your primary workflow, you blame the system.

How can a company with Google’s resources not see that?

Did no one test this with real users?

It’s hard to escape the conclusion that this decision was made inside a bubble.

Did Google watch new users struggle with AI and walk away?
Did they measure how often first-time users come back after a bad interaction
Did they test whether confidence collapses after a single hallucination?

Or did they simply assume that default placement would override human judgment?

Shipping AI into Chrome feels less like user research and more like organizational momentum — a decision optimized for internal narratives, not external reality.

Distribution doesn’t repair trust

Chrome is the largest software surface on Earth. Embedding Gemini there guarantees exposure, habit, and default usage. From a platform perspective, it’s a textbook power move.

But power doesn’t equal belief.

Users are already wary. They’ve learned — quickly — that AI sounds more certain than it is. Putting that behavior closer to the center of their digital lives doesn’t fix it. It magnifies it.

When AI is optional, users blame themselves.
When AI is unavoidable, users blame the product.

That’s a dangerous escalation.

The deeper problem: no one owns the experience

Gemini is not owned by a small, accountable team. It is the output of a large, siloed organization:

research teams train the models
platform teams embed them
product teams wrap them
safety and legal teams constrain them
communications teams explain failures afterward

When something goes wrong, responsibility dissolves.

So quality stalls. Errors become “known issues.” Hallucinations become “edge cases.” And no one feels personally exposed by the output.

That’s how you end up with impressive demos and unreliable systems — and how you end up misreading user reality.

Why this move creates risk, not inevitability

Big platforms often confuse ubiquity with destiny.

Microsoft once made Internet Explorer unavoidable. It didn’t make it trusted.
Facebook made social media unavoidable. It didn’t make it legitimate.
Google made search unavoidable — and is now watching trust erode as quality declines.

Distribution-first strategies peak early. Trust-first systems endure.

By forcing Gemini into Chrome, Google is raising expectations at the exact moment users are least forgiving.

AI 2.0 won’t be ambient

The next phase of AI will not be defined by how often users see it. It will be defined by whether they rely on it when the stakes matter.

AI 2.0 will favor systems that are:

owned by small, accountable teams
willing to say “I don’t know”
explicit about uncertainty
fast to correct
embarrassed when they fail

Embarrassment is the strongest quality control system ever invented. Organizations optimized to avoid it rarely produce systems people believe.

Unavoidable is not inevitable

Google has made Gemini impossible to miss.

That does not make it indispensable.

Adoption doesn’t fail because AI is hidden. It fails because early experiences destroy confidence. Until that reality is addressed, no amount of distribution will fix the problem.

The future of AI won’t belong to whoever pushes it hardest.
It will belong to whoever earns trust the hard way, the right way, the safe way.

And right now, Google looks like it’s running with scissors.