Google Appoints Prabhakar Raghavan as New Chief Technologist

In a major leadership change, Google has announced the appointment of Prabhakar Raghavan as the company’s Chief Technologist, succeeding long-time executive Nick Fox. Previously, Raghavan served as the Senior Vice President overseeing Google Search, Assistant, Geo, Ads, Commerce, and Payments products.

CEO Sundar Pichai shared the news in a blog post, stating that Raghavan will transition to his new role after 12 years of leading various teams within the search division. He will continue to report directly to Pichai.

“Prabhakar has decided it’s time to make a big leap in his own career,” Pichai mentioned in his post. “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.”

This strategic move comes as Google seeks to restructure its team to enhance its response in the competitive landscape of artificial intelligence, amid rising challenges and antitrust lawsuits concerning its search and advertising operations.

About Prabhakar Raghavan Raghavan brings a wealth of expertise to his new position as Chief Technologist. He earned a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and holds a Bachelor of Technology from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.

He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and has previously served as a Consulting Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University. Additionally, Raghavan was the editor-in-chief of the Journal of the ACM and received an honorary degree from the University of Bologna in 2009.

Before joining Google, he founded and led Yahoo Labs, focusing on search and ad ranking, and served as CTO at Verity. He spent 14 years at IBM, specializing in algorithms, data mining, and machine learning.

Raghavan's Future Role at Google As a recognized authority in search, Raghavan is co-author of two widely used graduate texts on algorithms and search. He has over 20 years of research experience, having published more than 100 papers and holding 20 patents, including several on web search link analysis.

Previously, Raghavan was Vice President of Google Apps and Google Cloud, where he managed engineering, products, and user experience. He played a key role in transforming the Apps division into a significant enterprise solution that supports Google’s Cloud business. Under his guidance, both Gmail and Drive surpassed 1 billion monthly active users, introducing machine intelligence features that enhanced user experiences, such as Smart Reply and Smart Compose.

In 2018, he took charge of the Ads & Commerce teams, overseeing search, display, and video advertising, as well as analytics and payments. His leadership has driven consistent growth while maintaining a strong focus on user trust and fair value exchange among users, publishers, and advertisers.

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