ORLANDO — Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, said that the concepts and interface behind Google Now could be applied to corporations, which are asking whether the Web card approach could apply to real work.

Schmidt, speaking at the Gartner Symposium ITXpo, was predictably peppered with questions about the search giant's enterprise ambitions.

The Google Now approach, which works well with consumers, could be applied to the enterprise with some artificial intelligence help scanning corporate data sets.

Schmidt said Google is experimenting with how Google Now could work within the enterprise. Schmidt said it could take the Google Now approach to calculate workflows in a corporation and look into being analytical.

"It should be possible to take that approach to any data set with current AI techniques," said Schmidt. Business analytics could be applied to an enterprise Google Now much like navigation, he added.

The theme from Schmidt was that the enterprise buying landscape will change dramatically. Schmidt said the licensing model deployed by Oracle and others won't persist. Today, there's a hybrid cloud and on-premise model, which is a second phase of leaving a licensing model behind.

"The third phase (of enterprise disruption) is driven by tablets and it looks like the majority of enterprise computing will happen on mobile devices. It broke the model. It looks to me you're going to have to dismantle existing infrastructure to work in the mobile model. It's happening right before your eyes."

If correct, enterprises will have to shed legacy infrastructure to compete. Companies will have to piggyback on the faster innovation cycle of consumer technologies such as the cloud.

For instance, Schmidt mocked current infrastructure. For instance, virtual private networks (VPNs) aren't totally secure. "It's a terrible architecture," he said.

Schmidt asked the audience for a show of hands if you're sure the Chinese aren't in your network right now. Four hands out of about 4,000 raised. When asked whether he was sure Google's network didn't have the Chinese poking around, Schmidt said he was — because Google checks every second. Schmidt also quipped that the U.S. government couldn't say the Chinese weren't poking around the network — since it's out of commission at the moment.

Among other key themes from Schmidt: