Google replaces executive in charge of Search and advertising

Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced on Thursday that Prabhakar Raghavan, the executive in charge of the company’s search engine and ads products, is leaving his role. Longtime Google executive Nick Fox will replace Raghavan, who will now take on the role of chief technologist.

“Prabhakar has decided it’s time to make a big leap in his own career,” Pichai said in the announcement. “After 12 years leading teams across Google, he’ll return to his computer science roots and take on the role of Chief Technologist, Google. In this role, he’ll partner closely with me and Google leads to provide technical direction and leadership and grow our culture of tech excellence.”

Raghavan led the Gmail team in launching Smart Reply and Smart Compose, which were the email service’s first AI products. Since then, Raghavan has overseen the launch of AI Overviews and Circle to Search, along with AI features in Maps and Shopping, such as Immersive View and virtual try-on.

Pichai says Fox has “been instrumental in shaping Google’s AI product roadmap and collaborating closely with Prabhakar and his leadership team.”

Fox has helped launch products like Google Fi and RCS messaging.

In addition to the change in roles, Pichai announced that the Gemini app team led by Sissie Hsiao will join Google DeepMind under Demis Hassabis.

The executive writes that bringing the two teams 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.”

The Google Assistant team will also become part of Google’s Platforms and Devices team so they can be closer to the products that they’re building for, Pichai says.

The changes announced today come as Google has been working to establish itself as a leader in AI. They also come as the company is facing several antitrust lawsuits.