Google Search's Vice President Prabhakar Raghavan Becomes Chief Technologist, CEO Sundar Pichai Confirms

Sundar Pichai said, "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."

The senior vice president of Search and Ads at Google, Prabhakar Raghavan, is relinquishing his position to take on the role of Google's Chief Technologist. The CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai, has made this announcement on October 17. It is important to note that this decision comes amid Google facing one of the biggest challenges of competition in a decade to its core search business. The ongoing shift in consumer behaviour and increasing competition is turning out to be a threat to Google's monopoly in the market.

Pichai, in a note to employees, said, "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," MoneyControl reported. He added that in this role, Raghavan will be working closely with Google leaders, including Pichai himself, to provide a technical direction and leadership to help the company grow its culture of tech excellence.

A Google veteran and Raghavan's team member, Nick Fox, will be replacing him to lead Google's knowledge and information products, which include search, ads, geo, and commerce products.

Prabhakar Raghavan At Google

The 64-year-old Prabhakar Raghavan switched to Google from Yahoo back in 2012. Initially, he worked as the vice president of Google Apps, Google Cloud and oversaw its engineering, products and user experience. He led the Gmail team to launch Smart Reply and Smart Compose.

He drove Gmail and Drive past 1 billion users. Then in 2018, he became the vice president of Ads, Commerce and Payments. He started overseeing Google Search and Assistant in 2020. 

During his time at Google, Gemini was launched, which was later halted because of the blunders that it made. Raghavan in the company's blogpost apologised publicly as the feature'missed the mark' and outlined what Google was doing to fix it. Gemini resumed image generation of people in August.