Google LLC today announced that Prabhakar Raghavan, the executive in charge of its search engine and advertising tools, will move to the role of chief technologist.
The development is part of a broader reorganization that affects several of the company’s businesses. Nick Fox, a longtime Google executive, will step into Raghavan’s current role. Meanwhile, two teams that work on Google Assistant and the Gemini chatbot will each move under the wing of a different business unit.
“AI 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,” Google Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai wrote in a blog post detailing the changes.
Raghavan is currently senior vice president of Google’s Knowledge and Information product portfolio. The portfolio includes the Alphabet Inc. unit’s search engine and advertising tools, its primary sources of revenue. Raghavan also oversees the company’s e-commerce tools, payment processing platform, Google Assistant and several other products.
The executive is taking up the chief technologist role after six years at the head of the Knowledge and Information group. Raghavan, who holds a doctorate in computer science, will “partner closely with me and Google leads to provide technical direction and leadership and grow our culture of tech excellence,” Pichai wrote in today’s blog post.
Nick Fox, a member of Raghavan’s leadership team, has been appointed as the new head of the Knowledge and Information group. Fox is currently vice president of product and design for Google Assistant. The executive previously held several other leadership roles in the Knowledge and Information group.
As part of today’s reorganization, Google is also making changes to the business unit that develops Google Assistant. A number of teams within the group that focus on “devices and home experiences” will move to the search giant’s Platforms & Devices business. The latter business is responsible for, among others, the development of Google’s smart home devices and Pixel handsets.
The team responsible for the search giant’s Gemini consumer chatbot is likewise affected by the reorganization. The unit will become part of the Google DeepMind artificial intelligence research lab. The latter group is led by Demis Hassabis, who won this year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry with two other scientists for his work on the AlphaFold2 protein structure prediction system.
The Gemini chatbot is based on a line of large language models, also called Gemini, that was developed by Google DeepMind. “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 explained.