A look at Google's Next Billion Users team, tasked with building products and apps for people who have yet to use the internet, often in developing markets
Katie Deighton / Wall Street Journal :
Context & Ripple Effects
The Next Billion Users effort began as a market-entry push — Google's early push into Indonesia treated first-time internet users as a distinct product audience rather than a smaller version of existing ones. By 2017 the thesis had hardened into design doctrine, with tech firms reworking interfaces around voice, video, and images for markets with lower literacy rates (the voice-and-video-first rethink).
First-order effects
- The team's remit spans flagship properties — Caesar Sengupta ran Next Billion Users alongside Google Pay and Chrome OS before his 2021 departure after 15 years, so the group's output sits inside core Google products, not a side lab.
Second-order effects
- Because the same low-bandwidth, non-text-first design constraints apply across emerging markets, rival consumer platforms face pressure to match interface choices Google validates there, turning developing-market UX into a competitive template rather than a local accommodation.
Third-order effects
- The playbook appears to be repeating at larger scale: Google's more recent hiring of hundreds of forward deployed engineers to help customers adopt its business AI products extends the same embed-with-the-user discipline from first-time consumers to enterprise AI adoption.
The trend: Designing for users new to computing — first the unconnected consumer, now the AI-unready enterprise — is becoming a standing organizational function inside big tech rather than a one-off expansion project.