I think to be a little more specific and accurate here, we could view Google as very much needing to protect its "golden goose".
It has this massively profitable search business that it needs to protect at all costs. It doesn't want to be seen as a competitor to everyone publishing web content. If it answers questions in the SERPs it will consume screen space from in-search ads and reduce page clicks to pages that show Google's ads. So I think that is less about lethargy and more about being scared to disrupt itself. If it shows some AI-generated content that is perceived negatively it could cause reputational damage (like Boston Dynamics was) and cause advertisers to not advertise with Google.
And this fear is a classical instance of a large company being scared to do anything that could hurt its primary business, which reduces innovation and its ability to act in a forward-thinking way. This gives a chance to competitors that don't have this same fear of hurting their profitable business. Often these are upstarts like OpenAI.
Google's been answering certain questions above the fold in the SERPs for a while, sometimes very well, other times hilariously badly.
I'm not sure Bing doing the same thing a bit more with technology probably less suited for typical search questions is quite as disruptive as is being made out...
It has this massively profitable search business that it needs to protect at all costs. It doesn't want to be seen as a competitor to everyone publishing web content. If it answers questions in the SERPs it will consume screen space from in-search ads and reduce page clicks to pages that show Google's ads. So I think that is less about lethargy and more about being scared to disrupt itself. If it shows some AI-generated content that is perceived negatively it could cause reputational damage (like Boston Dynamics was) and cause advertisers to not advertise with Google.
And this fear is a classical instance of a large company being scared to do anything that could hurt its primary business, which reduces innovation and its ability to act in a forward-thinking way. This gives a chance to competitors that don't have this same fear of hurting their profitable business. Often these are upstarts like OpenAI.