Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s plan to make Gemini the only AI that matters |
03-23-2026MOST INNOVATIVE COMPANIES
Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s plan to make Gemini the only AI that matters
Under Pichai, the company that invented modern AI is finally winning the race to deploy it—and making ‘AI everywhere’ a business reality.
Sundar Pichai was blindsided by ChatGPT. Soon after being named Google CEO in 2015, he’d declared that the world was entering an AI-first era. He went on to bet his stewardship of the entire company on his belief that the technology would be “an intelligent assistant helping you throughout your day,” as he put it in his first shareholder letter. Yet his prescience hadn’t prevented OpenAI from swooping in on November 30, 2022, with the first product that truly demonstrated the epoch-shifting power of generative AI, a breakthrough that had emerged from Google’s research labs in the first place.
Pichai remembers his instinctive response to ChatGPT: “Wow, this technology is going to diffuse earlier and faster than we were expecting.” The feeling, he says, was “uncomfortably exciting.” He knew that if AI was entering hyperdrive ahead of schedule, Google would have to scramble.
Pichai is sharing this memory in a conference room at Google’s expansive office at Manhattan’s Pier 57, a former steamship cargo facility. As we talk, in early January, he radiates his usual air of genial unflappability—the same manner with which he apparently received the arrival of ChatGPT just over three years ago. “I felt we had all the right building blocks in place,” he explains. “And so my genuine reaction was, ‘How do we meet that moment with the resources we have?’ I was deeply focused on what I needed to do.”
Assembling those building blocks was a yearslong process that led to the company’s newest series of AI models, Gemini 3. It debuted in November with Gemini 3 Pro, which beat its rivals from OpenAI and Anthropic across an array of industry-standard benchmarks for gauging AI capabilities—sometimes by dramatic margins. A faster, more computationally efficient version, Gemini 3 Flash, followed the next month. Both are already powering Google Search and other products, impressing AI watchers. Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledged the wind in Google’s sails: “I expect the vibes out there to be rough for a bit,” he told staffers in an internal memo after Gemini 3 Pro’s release.
Gemini 3’s strong start capped a year of steady AI progress mirrored in the stock price of Alphabet, Google’s parent company. After underperforming throughout the broad AI rally and bottoming out in April 2025, its stock price has more than doubled. In January 2026, when Google and Apple announced a deal to run future versions of Siri and other Apple AI features on Gemini, Alphabet hit a $4 trillion market cap for the first time.
That Google is suddenly so widely regarded as one of AI’s biggest winners is striking given the skepticism that once clouded its efforts. Many observers saw the 28-year-old company’s previous success—particularly in monetizing its market-dominating search engine—as an obstacle to it being able to reimagine itself around the technology.
“Google may be only a year or two away from total disruption,” tweeted ex-Googler and Gmail inventor Paul Buchheit the day after ChatGPT’s appearance. “AI will eliminate the Search Engine Result Page, which is where they make most of their money. Even if they catch up on AI, they can’t fully deploy it without destroying the most valuable part of their business!”
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