Who is Prabhakar Raghavan, the new Chief Technologist of Google?

Search engine giant Google has announced a major leadership reshuffle, promoting Prabhakar Raghavan, who until now was the Senior Vice President in charge of Google Search, Assistant, Geo, Ads, Commerce, and Payments products, as the Chief Technologist. He has been replaced by longtime Google executive Nick Fox.

What Sundar Pichai said

According to Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Alphabet, Raghavan will be moving into the role of Chief Technologist after 12 years of leading teams across Google. Raghavan will continue to report to Pichai in the new role.

CREDIT: GOOGLE

¡°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 at Google,¡± Pichai wrote in a note to employees.

Raghavan, who led the Knowledge and Information unit of Google since 2018, has been with the company since 2012.

CREDIT: Reuters

Who is Prabhakar Raghavan?

Born in India, Raghavan is an electrical engineering graduate from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and did his Master of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Raghavan also holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.

Raghavan started his career as a research staff at IBM and was with the company for 14 years before switching to Verity in 2004 and to Yahoo a year later.

At Yahoo, Raghavan worked on research projects, including search and advertising, and rose to the rank of Chief Strategy Officer in 2011.

CREDIT: BCCL

Prabhakar Raghavan's major works in Google

He joined Google in 2012 and led the development of several key features in its Search, Ads, Gmail, and Maps.

He 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. Across K&I, Prabhakar and his team have achieved significant growth and innovation: from launching AI Overviews, a groundbreaking advancement in Search that benefits hundreds of millions of users worldwide, to introducing new search modalities like Circle to Search, video understanding, and "shop what you see" in Lens ¡ª all while improving core Search functionality. Maps and Shopping have transformed with AI-driven features like immersive view and virtual try-on," Pichai noted.

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