Eric Schmidt says Google is falling behind on AI—and remote work is wh

Eric Schmidt, ex-CEO and executive chairman at Google, said his former company is losing the artificial intelligence race and remote work is to blame.

“Google decided that work-life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning,” Schmidt said at a talk at Stanford University. “The reason startups work is because the people work like hell.”

Schmidt made the comments earlier at a wide-ranging discussion at Stanford. His remarks about Google’s remote-work policies were in response to a question about Google competing with OpenAI.

Video of the talk was posted this week by Stanford Online, a division of the university which offers online courses.

Google, a unit of Alphabet, and a representative for Schmidt didn’t respond to requests for comment.

He joins a long list of corporate leaders, including JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and Tesla CEO Elon Musk who have complained about work-from-home policies, saying they make companies less efficient and less competitive. Dimon said in an annual letter a few years ago that people in the upper ranks “cannot lead from behind a desk or in front of a screen.” Musk has said workers need “a minimum of 40 hours in the office per week.”

Companies have sometimes struggled to get employees back in the office, citing long commutes and caregiving duties. In some cases, employees have pushed back against the mandates.

The former Google CEO told the students that in-office work was necessary to succeed in a hypercompetitive startup environment.

“If you all leave the university and go found a company, you’re not going to let people work from home and only come in one day a week if you want to compete against the other startups,” Schmidt said.

Google has been playing defense on AI ever since OpenAI launched ChatGPT in late 2022. The company stumbled earlier this year with the release of its Gemini chatbot, which was met with criticism that it was biased.

The company has beefed up Gemini and will offer it on the company’s four new Pixel phones. It features an improved humanlike voice assistant with natural conversation skills.

Google has gotten stricter about employees’ time in the office. Last year, it started including office attendance as a factor in annual performance reviews. In 2022, the company said employees would be back to the office three days a week.

Write to Joseph De Avila at joseph.deavila@wsj.com