How Google CEO Sundar Pichai assumed leadership in the age of AI

The announcement capped a year of dramatic changes within the search giant. This comes almost 12 months after Google merged his two major artificial intelligence groups, DeepMind and Google Brain. The timing is no coincidence. Google has been lagging behind in AI, becoming complacent and fighting the narrative that it has become a latecomer in the industry. There are also calls for Pichai to resign.

In response, Mr. Pichai redesigned his leadership team to move faster and foster collaboration between historically siled business units. To that end, he looked internally and promoted a combination of people with years of experience and established leaders to run Google's next era.

Pichai currently has 18 people reporting to him, including former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, who now serves as an advisor to the company, according to an internal organizational chart obtained by Business Insider. ing. Pichai's revamped leadership team still outperforms many of its Google peers, but several leaders now oversee more teams as the company streamlines and removes walls. .

A Google spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

Google's AI MVP

Demis Hassabis may be the most important person at Google right now.

DeepMind's founder and CEO sold the startup to Google in 2014, but spent most of the past decade running the unit at arm's length from the mothership. Then, last April, Pichai announced that DeepMind and Google's internal AI division, known as Brain, would be merged to form a supergroup called Google DeepMind.

Hassabis is in charge of this new AI command center. He called this unit “.Google's engine room in the AI ​​era” — oversees about 2,600 employees, according to internal data reviewed by BI. This week, in another sign of how Google has given its AI crown a bearhug, Hassabis made his Google I/O stage debut.

Hassabis has gained further power in recent months. As part of last month's reorganization, several other teams within the research group will become part of Google DeepMind, including a team that builds machine learning models, Pichai said. The Hassabis force will also absorb the Responsible AI Group, which is responsible for the safe development of AI.

Combining the teams could help Hassabis and Google DeepMind move faster toward their goal of building artificial general intelligence. This is the mission agreed upon by Hassabis and Google co-founder Larry Page when DeepMind was acquired. This also means Hassabis will now work closely with Google's employees implementing his AI into key products. In last year's merger, DeepMind sacrificed some projects deemed too academic or without a clear path to consumer products, former employees said.

Former and current Google employees BI spoke to for this article spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press. Their true identity is known to us.

While some insiders have floated Hassabis as a possible candidate for the CEO chair at Google, two people close to DeepMind's co-founders say Hassabis is in charge of the day-to-day management of the nearly 200,000-employee company. He suggested that it would be a hellish experience.

That's not to say he doesn't need to do some proper corporate diplomacy right now. The merger of Google's AI divisions will have to overcome years of conflict between Brain and DeepMind, which caused friction over how much research should be shared between the teams (and went so far as to block each other's code from each other). That meant he had to, former employees said.

Under Hassabis' stewardship, Google solidified its position in OpenAI with the release of its large-scale language model Gemini. It also faced setbacks, including an embarrassing fiasco in which Gemini's image generator produced historically inaccurate images of people of color.

OpenAI is still moving rapidly towards commercialization of its research, and Google has no chance of slowing down. One employee said the company is busy training its successor to Gemini, and at this week's I/O conference the company announced a myriad of exciting new products that run on Gemini.

Pixel leader gains more power

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The collision of Google's services and hardware groups wasn't just a dramatic structural change. It was a huge vote of confidence in hardware chief Rick Osterloh, who has been building the division over the past eight years.

It was also a sign that Google wants to get more serious about its own hardware, such as the Pixel, especially as it looks to seize significant opportunities in AI on Android. In a memo to staff in April, Pichai said the changes would give Google “an incredible opportunity to reimagine its computing platform for the next 10 years.”

Google also promoted Sameer Samat to president of the Android ecosystem in April. Previously serving as vice president and general manager, he replaces Google's former Android leader Hiroshi Lockheimer, who left last month to take on other projects within Google.

Mr. Osterloh currently oversees about 25,000 employees, making it one of the company's largest divisions, according to internal documents, and the size of Google's search and management division, led by senior vice president Prabhakar Raghavan. It is said to be about the same size as the advertising group.

Some current and former employees have expressed disappointment with the progress Google has made in hardware under Osterloh's leadership, including fumbling products like Fitbit and Stadia. Google's Pixel smartphones have improved features and design, but have little market penetration.

While Apple is working to bring AI capabilities to the iPhone, Siri has so far been a disappointment as an AI assistant, giving Google an opportunity to combine its own AI and hardware to create something more engaging. The New York Times reported that he gave.

Under Osterloh's watch, Google has struggled to catch up with Apple in another category: augmented reality. A change in leadership and a shift in strategy have plagued the division's attempts to build a potential rival to Apple's Vision Pro.

Google is making advances with the technology it acquired from Raxium in 2022, which could pave the way for Google's own AR devices, according to an employee familiar with the matter. In the short term, Google still plans to launch the Android XR operating system and find a partner to build Glass on top of it, as BI previously reported and Pichai suggested in an interview with CNBC on Tuesday. There is.

Osterloh will spend the next few weeks and months as a diplomat. Assuring Android Partners Nothing changes in that department. For years, a firewall existed between Google's hardware and Android units. This is a way for Google to prevent you from playing your favorite games on its devices.

Some employees within the Android organization believe Osterloh is responsible for recent job cuts in the hardware division and are concerned that their jobs will suddenly become more vulnerable because of it. said one current employee.

Others within Google say Osterloh is a good bet, with the sharp elbows — and now the resources — needed to make a move that could keep Apple CEO Tim Cook up at night. There is.

One executive said Osterloh was prepared to make decisions that would “upset a lot of people” if necessary.

“Hiroshi is kinder, but being kind doesn't get you anywhere on Google,” they added. “At least it's not like that anymore.”

A search veteran takes the reins

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In March, Google appointed company veteran Liz Reid as head of search as part of a major shake-up of the company's most valuable product.

Although Reid's appointment did not receive as much attention as other recent moves, her promotion was significant. Reid will report to Raghavan, senior vice president of advertising and search, and is leading a dramatic transition for Google Search. At its I/O event this week, Google announced that AI Overviews, the company's generative AI search experience, is rolling out in the US and will be available to more than 1 billion people by the end of the year.

Mr. Reed joined Google Local in 2003 as one of its first engineers and has spent his career there focused on how to deliver high-quality, relevant information to users. In 2021, BI reported that Mr. Reid took on a larger role in his Google search and since then he has focused on developing AI capabilities.

In another sign of the importance of AI in the future of Google Search, the company promoted Cheenu Venkatachary, vice president of product who joined Google to work on AI development, to lead search quality and rankings. I was allowed to. Venkatachary's successor, Pandu Nayak, has stepped down and taken on the role of principal investigator, where he will continue to consult on issues such as search quality and rankings.

As Google's generative AI search rolls out, Reed and his team face a big challenge. More AI-generated spam, less visibility for publishers, and disruption to search advertising, the company's cash cow.

It's also battling chatbots from companies like Perplexity and OpenAI that increasingly operate like search engines, with reports suggesting that OpenAI may be close to launching its own full search product. Fears that chatbots will erode Google's search dominance have yet to materialize, giving Google time to reinvent its most sacred product. Still, we know we need to act quickly.

“Small companies like Perplexity have strong PR, but they don't really show up in their query share numbers,” Bernstein senior analyst Marc Schmulik told BI. “I think Google is actually doing a good job on what a year ago would have been considered an existential risk.”