Google's search boss Prabhakar Raghavan becomes chief technologist amid company reshuffle

Prabhakar Raghavan, senior vice president, Google

Prabhakar Raghavan, Google's senior vice president in charge of search, ads, and other prominent products, is leaving his role to assume a new position as the tech giant's Chief Technologist, chief executive Sundar Pichai said on October 17.

This move comes as Google's core search business is encountering its biggest challenge in over a decade amid renewed competition from rivals such as Microsoft and OpenAI and upstarts such as Perplexity, and an ongoing shift in consumer behavior.

"Prabhakar has decided it’s time to make a big leap in his own career. After 12 years leading teams across Google, he'll return to his computer science roots and take on the role of Chief Technologist, Google" Pichai said in a note to employees.

In this role, Raghavan will partner closely with Pichai and Google leaders to provide technical direction and leadership and grow the company's culture of tech excellence, he said.

Nick Fox, a Google veteran and member of Raghavan’s leadership team, will be taking over his role to lead the tech giant's knowledge and information products which include search, ads, geo, and commerce products.

Simplifying structure

This development comes amid a broader reshuffling in the firm's Knowledge and Information (K&I) team, with the Gemini app team led by Sissie Hsiao joining Google DeepMind under its chief executive Demis Hassabis.

"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.

The Google Assistant teams focused on devices and home experiences will become part of the firm's Platforms and Devices team headed by senior vice-president Rick Osterloh.

"AI (Artificial Intelligence) moves faster than any technology before it. To keep increasing the pace of progress, we've been making shifts to simplify our structures along the way, including the creation of Google DeepMind and the joining of the Platforms & Devices teams. As a next step, Prabhakar and I have been thinking through how to structure our Knowledge & Information team for the Gemini era" Pichai said in the note.

In April, Google merged the Android, Chrome, and its hardware divisions to create the Platforms and Devices team that will oversee the overall Android platform, Google Play, Chrome, the Pixel portfolio, Nest, and Fitbit among others. Last year, the firm also merged its AI research units, DeepMind and Google Brain, into a single division called Google DeepMind, led by Hassabis.

Raghavan's journey

64-year old Raghavan joined Google in 2012 from Yahoo, where he was responsible for its search and ad ranking as well as ad marketplace design. He initially served as Vice President of Google Apps, Google Cloud, overseeing its engineering, products and user experience.

Raghavan led the Gmail team in launching Smart Reply and Smart Compose as early examples of using AI to improve products, and took Gmail and Drive past 1 billion users, Pichai said.

He was made the senior vice president of ads, commerce and payments in 2018, taking over from Sridhar Ramaswamy. Raghavan has been overseeing Google Search and Assistant since 2020.

During this stint, Google launched its AI-powered search experience AI Overviews, along with other search features such as Circle to Search, video understanding, and "shop what you see" in Lens, the company's visual search tool.

Google Maps and Shopping have also rolled out AI-driven features such as immersive view and virtual try-on while the ads business introduced AI-powered ad formats and streamlined campaign management among others.

That said, Google paused Gemini's ability to create images of people after facing severe criticism from consumers in February, due to inaccuracies in its depictions of certain historical figures.

Raghavan publicly apologised in a company blogpost, saying the feature 'missed the mark' while outlining how it happened and what the company is doing to fix it. Gemini resumed image generation of people in August.

Fox, who joined Google in 2003, has been instrumental in shaping Google's AI product roadmap over the past few years, Pichai said in the note to employees.

"Throughout his career, Nick (Fox) 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" he said.

He has also helped launch products such as Google Fi and RCS messaging among others. "I frequently turn to Nick to tackle our most challenging product questions and he consistently delivers progress with tenacity, speed, and optimism" Pichai said.