Sundar Pichai

Sundar Pichai is an Indian-born American executive who is best known as the CEO of Google and its holding company, Alphabet Inc. He is known as a successful innovator with a sharp memory and strong opinions, whose organizational skills and early focus on developing new products and services at Google brought him to the attention of Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and led him eventually to the CEO role at Google.

Sundar Pichai was born Pichai Sundararajan on June 10, 1972, in Madras, now Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India, to a middle-class family. His father, Reguntha Pichai, was an electrical engineer who worked at the British company General Electric Company, and his mother, Lakshmi Pichai, worked as a stenographer. Speaking on his childhood, Pichai has said:

There was a simplicity to my life, which was very nice compared with today's world. We lived in a kind of modest housed, shared with tenants. We would sleep on the living room floor. There was a drought when I was growing up, and we had anxiety. Even now, I can never sleep without a bottle of water beside my bed. Other houses had refrigerators, and then we finally got one. It was a big deal.

In speaking of his early interest in technology, Pichai has credited his father and has relayed a story about his family receiving their first telephone. They had applied for the telephone and waited five years, and once the phone arrived, he saw how neighbors would visit to connect with their family and showed Pichai, in his words, "the power of what's possible with technology."

Sundar Pichai attended the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, where he graduated from in 1993 with a degree in metallurgy and a silver medal. He was subsequently awarded a scholarship to Stanford University, where he would attend and eventually earn his master's degree in material sciences and engineering in 1997 after abandoning the Ph.D. program.

Sundar Pichai, pictured in a Stanford sweater.

Following his graduation from Stanford University, he joined Applied Materials, a semiconductor manufacturer in Silicon Valley, where he worked as a product manager. He then pursued an MBA at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School and graduated in 2002. After earning his MBA, Pichai joined the management consulting firm McKinsey & Company for a few years.

In 2004, Sundar Pichai joined Google as the head of product management and development. He was tasked with developing the Google Toolbar, which enabled users on the Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox web browsers to easily access the Google search engine and allowed Google to track browsing behavior to power the AdWords targeting engine. The Google Toolbar was a success, but Pichai feared the browsers would develop their own proprietary search functions and lock Google out.

Over the next few years, he pitched for Google to develop its own browser. Although he was initially unsuccessful, he continued to campaign for the browser, which would eventually be greenlit and released to the public in 2008 as Google Chrome. Over the next few years, Google Chrome would become the most popular web browser in the world. In 2008, Pichai was named vice president of product development, a more active and more public role in the company.

Sundar Pichai announcing the launch of the Chromebook.

Following this, Pichai headed the development of the Chrome Operating System and the Chromebook program, which launched in 2011. In 2012, he was named senior vice president of product development. He then took over the development of the Android Operating System in 2013, when he was noted as integrating Android better with the rest of Google, and where his tenure was noted for an increase in the collaboration between Google and Android, which is credited in an increase in the usability and popularity of the mobile operating system since.

By 2014, he was named the leader of all of Google's products and platforms. He oversaw Search, Maps, Play, Android, Chrome, Gmail, and Google Workspace. At this time, in 2014, he was known to help negotiate Google's $3.2 billion acquisition of Nest Labs.

Pichai, during his tenure at Google as a product manager and developer, was aggressively pursued by other companies. The first such pursuit occurred in 2011 when Pichai was reportedly pursued by microblogging service Twitter. In 2014, he was suggested to be in contention for the role of CEO of Microsoft, with a lot of industry gossip placing him in serious contention for the role that eventually went to Satya Nadella. Google was able to retain Sundar Pichai during these lures, and in 2015, he was named as Google's new CEO when Google reorganized into Alphabet—in part to allow Google to focus on its products and services rather than managing its subsidiaries and acquisitions.

Sundar Pichai during CEO.

As CEO, Sundar Pichai has led Google to invest in new opportunities, such as Google Cloud, and he continues to research advanced technologies to continue to push Google forward, such as machine learning, generative artificial intelligence (AI), and quantum computing. As part of Alphabet's structure, which was to place a CEO to run each business, Pichai was put in charge of one of the most pivotal and important parts of this structure, which included Search, Maps, Commerce, Advertising, and infrastructure.

Sundar Pichai's management style has been referred to as low-key, with what has been called an unusually firm handle on diplomacy, which has been credited to his rapid rise through Google. He has been noted to have strong opinions with clear points of view but allows those under him to speak and offer their opinions before he gives his own. Others have noted his ability to develop close, collaborative teams and put people in the places and roles that fit them best, which allows him, in the opinion of some, to delegate effectively. He also works to nurture those teams and help them grow.

In 2019, in part on the strength of the work Sundar Pichai did as the CEO of Google, cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin announced Sundar Pichai would be named the CEO of Alphabet. Unlike when Pichai was Google CEO and Page was Alphabet CEO, Pichai remained the Google CEO while holding the Alphabet CEO role.

In 2023, Sundar Pichai has faced some criticism from inside and outside Google. This has come in part during Google's fumbling of consumer and enterprise AI efforts and in the wake of Microsoft and OpenAI's deal, which makes Microsoft's Bing a serious competitor to Google's main business segment. Further, the criticism has come as Google was, previous to early 2023, seen as being in a front-runner role of AI development based on the company's army of engineers and researchers, access to data and data centers, and quantum computing efforts.

This has led critics of Pichai to wonder if he, and by extension Google, have become complacent and whether Pichai is capable of taking the company to the next step. Some have suggested this is due to Pichai's slower pace of decision-making, his reported dislike for conflict and for making unpopular decisions, and those critics have reportedly suggested his voice as a leader is too weak in the company. Those same critics have said, at the same time, that were Sundar Pichai able to allay some of those concerns, they would not see a reason for him to step down from his current role.

Sundar Pichai has joined a group of technologists, executives, and academics calling for a global regulatory framework for AI similar to treaties used to regulate nuclear arms and also warning about the corporate competition over AI, leading to safety concerns being pushed aside. Pichai's concerns are based on the potential of technology to radically and rapidly change societies and that many of the developers and deployers of the technology do not completely understand how it works. Pichai has described AI technology as a "black box" in the industry, with concerns that developers do not fully understand the aspects, similar to the lack of understanding of how the human brain works.

In relation to societies, Pichai's concerns are around a described "mismatch" between the pace at which AI is developing and advancing and the pace at which society thinks and adapts to change. He has noted that AI has been developing and evolving at a pace far more rapid than society is able to keep up, saying at one point that AI will impact everything, from every product across every company, and will be a profound technology. However, in an interview, he noted:

Compared to any other technology, I've seen more people worried about it earlier in its life cycle. So I feel optimistic.

Pichai's other concerns are around the AI model's ability to develop skills that the model was not expected to have. He noted, in an interview, that Google's generative AI model, Bard, taught itself Bengali, even though it was not trained to know the language, after a few prompts in Bengali. Similarly, there are concerns about the "hallucinations" of AI models. These hallucinations occur when an AI model answers a question or prompt, but the answer is incorrect (sometimes wildly), but the AI model asserts the answer is correct with confidence. The concerns over these hallucinations are that they can lead to fake news, deep fakes, and weaponization with a confidence that is very convincing.

Sundar and Anjali Pichai.

Sundar Pichai moved permanently to the United States after graduating from Stanford University. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, Anjali Pichai, and their two children. The couple met in college and married shortly after Sundar Pichai started a job at Applied Materials and Anjali Pichai had moved to the United States.