Google CEO Sundar Pichai revealed a change in leadership for its Knowledge & Information unit, which encompasses ads, commerce, Google Earth, and search: Nick Fox will take over for Prabhakar Raghavan.
Raghavan has led the K&I unit since 2018, and he will become chief technologist at Google.
“Prabhakar has decided that it’s time to make a big leap in his own career,” Pichai said in a publicly shared 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. In this role, he’ll partner closely with me and Google leads to provide technical direction and leadership and grow our culture of tech excellence.”
Fox has been with Google since 2003, and he was a part of Raghavan’s leadership team, most recently in the role of vice president of product and design for artificial intelligence-powered Google Assistant.
“Throughout his career, Nick has demonstrated leadership across nearly every facet of K&I, from product and design in search and Assistant, to our shopping, travel, and payments products,” Pichai wrote. “He was also a pioneering leader in ads, where he helped establish a rigorous quality and user-focused approach that remains key to our success.”
The shake-up comes at a turbulent time for the company as it deals with multiple antitrust lawsuits concerning its search and ads businesses. Its search business is facing additional pressure: Google’s search advertising business is expected to dip below a 50% market share in the U.S. next year for the first time in more than a decade, according to the research firm eMarketer.
AI is top-of-mind at Google, as competition in the space is heating up. Pichai also announced that the team working on Google’s Gemini application, which includes its AI direct-to-consumer products, will join AI unit Google DeepMind under Demis Hassabis, that division’s CEO.
“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 wrote. “The Assistant teams focused on devices and home experiences will move to Platforms & Devices so that they can sit closer to the product surfaces they’re building for, bring our AI-powered home initiatives into one team, and focus on improving user experience.”