When the San Francisco start-up OpenAI released ChatGPT late last year, the A.I. chatbot looked like the first significant threat in decades to Google. One day, tech insiders thought, it could make Google’s internet search engine look old and stodgy.

Google executives vowed a fast response to protect the company’s $162 billion franchise and said that artificial intelligence would be woven throughout its products, from the search engine to email.

On Wednesday, at its annual conference in Mountain View, Calif., the company demonstrated some of what it has been working on. Google said its search engine will begin incorporating responses generated by A.I. at the top of query results pages and allow users to ask follow-up questions.

It was a notable step toward Google’s embrace of A.I., which many experts believe could remake the tech industry. Google was a pioneer in the technology, but had been reluctant to do too much with it because A.I. comes with risks, like spreading false information.