Prabhakar Raghavan, Google’s senior vice president in charge of Google Search, Assistant, Geo, Ads, Commerce and Payments products, is going to become the Chief Technologist of the search engine giant, Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai announced on Thursday, October 17.
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This comes as Google’s core business, which is search, gets increased competition from rivals like Microsoft, OpenAI and even startups like Perplexity, according to a Moneycontrol report.
An ongoing shift in consumer behaviour may also play a part in this.
“Prabhakar has decided it’s time to make a big leap in his own career,” Pichai wrote in a note to employees. “After 12 years leading teams across Google, he’ll return to his computer science roots and take on the role of Chief Technologist, Google.”
Raghavan’s current role will be replaced by Google veteran and member of Raghavan’s leadership team Nick Fox.
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This also comes amid a reshuffling of the Google’s Knowledge and Information (K&I) team. “Bringing the teams closer together will improve feedback loops, enable fast deployment of our new models in the Gemini app, make our post-training work proceed more efficiently and build on our great product momentum” Pichai said.
Who is Prabhakar Raghavan?
Prabhakar Raghavan, 64, joined Google in 2012, coming from Yahoo where he worked at search and ad ranking as well as ad marketplace design.
He was the Vice President of Google Apps and Google Cloud, managing engineering, products and user experience. Then he led the Gmail team, launching early AI products such as Smart Reply and Smart Compose.
Gmail and Drive eventually attained more than one billion users.
In 2018, he became the senior vice president of Google Search, Assistant, Geo, Ads, Commerce and Payments products, taking over from Sridhar Ramaswamy.
Under his leadership, AI Overviews and other search features like Circle to Search, video understanding, and “shop what you see” in Lens were all launched.
When Gemini faced criticism regarding inaccuracies in its depictions of certain historical figures, Raghavan had publicly apologised in a company blogpost, telling how it happened and how Google is fixing it.
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