Sundar Pichai

Sundar Pichai (born 1972) has been chief executive officer of Google since 2015 and, since December 2019, also of its parent company Alphabet. Alphabet's 2026 proxy statement gives his age as 53. He took over the running of the company from its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, rising to CEO from the product side.

From Chennai to Stanford and Wharton

According to the biography Google supplied to the US House of Representatives, updated in December 2019, he grew up in Chennai, India, and studied engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, where he was awarded the Institute Silver Medal. Alphabet's proxy statement lists his degrees as a Bachelor of Technology from IIT Kharagpur, a Master of Science from Stanford University and an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. At Wharton he was named a Siebel Scholar and a Palmer Scholar.

From the Toolbar to Chrome

He joined Google in 2004 and helped lead the development of Google Toolbar and then Chrome. In September 2008, when a comic introducing Chrome went out ahead of schedule, the official blog post announcing the beta for the next day carried the names of Pichai, as vice-president of product management, and engineering director Linus Upson (see Google Chrome). Google's own biography says Chrome grew to become the world's most popular browser.

His later promotions are dated in the proxy statement: senior vice-president of Android, Chrome and Apps from March 2013 to October 2014, then senior vice-president of products from October 2014 to October 2015, leading product and engineering for Search, Maps, Play, Android, Chrome, Gmail and other products.

CEO of Google

In August 2015 Page announced the creation of the holding company Alphabet in a letter, "G is for Google," and with it that Pichai would become CEO of Google. The letter said he had stepped up since the previous October, when he took on product and engineering responsibility for the internet businesses, and that it was clear to Page, Brin and the board that it was time for him to be CEO. The proxy statement dates his appointment as Google's CEO to October 2015. He joined the Alphabet board in July 2017.

On 3 December 2019 Page and Brin wrote jointly that Alphabet and Google no longer needed two CEOs and a President, and that Pichai would be CEO of both. The founders said they would remain involved as board members and shareholders.

"AI first"

The first direction he set as CEO is in the Founders' Letter published on 28 April 2016. Over time, he wrote, the very concept of the "device" would fade away and the computer, whatever its form, would become an intelligent assistant: "We will move from mobile first to an AI first world." The proxy statement likewise says that as CEO he has shifted the company's strategy to focus on AI.

Many of the milestones that followed were announced by him in person.

When Geoffrey Hinton left Google in April 2023, it was Pichai he spoke to by phone (see Hinton leaves Google).

Assessment

Pichai's tenure coincides with the period in which a company built on search and advertising became a direct participant in the race over generative AI. As the table shows, many of the major announcements of that period were made in his name. How the "AI first" of 2016 relates to the response after late 2022 has to be judged against the detail on each event page. The company's business and figures are on the organization page.