As if google search wasn't already using AI for years
Genuinely I don't understand why people are getting so worked up over this. Maybe I'm understanding the article/news wrong, but what I gathered from it is just a very tangled corpo way of saying that the Gemini search will now be on the main page instead of the separate tab.
They clearly state the search box will still be there, as well as individual web links.
As for the search engine, Google has openly stated it used AI/machine learning for over a decade now, so unless they intend to rely completely on AI's answers with no other search methods, there is no real issue.
Besides scanning through thousands of articles/web pages and finding repeating patterns to give you the average result is the one thing AI excels at and one of it's real world uses.