Google LLC today announced that Prabhakar Raghavan, the head of its search engine and advertising tools, will serve as its chief technologist.

This development is part of a broader reorganization which affects several of the company’s activities. Nick Fox, a longtime Google executive, will assume Raghavan’s current role. Meanwhile, two teams working on Google Assistant and the Gemini chatbot will each operate under the wing of a different business unit.

“AI is evolving faster than any technology before it. To continue accelerating the pace of our progress, we have made changes to simplify our structures along the way,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote in a statement. blog post detailing the changes.

Raghavan is currently the Senior Vice President of Google’s Knowledge & Insights product portfolio. The portfolio includes the Alphabet Inc. unit’s search engine and advertising tools, its main sources of revenue. Raghavan also oversees the company’s e-commerce tools, payment processing platform, Google Assistant and several other products.

The executive assumes the role of chief technologist after six years leading the Knowledge and Information group. Raghavan, who holds a doctorate in computer science, “will partner closely with me and Google to provide technical direction and leadership and grow our culture of technological excellence,” Pichai wrote in today’s blog.

Nick Fox, a member of the Raghavan leadership team, has been appointed as the new head of the Knowledge and Information group. Fox is currently the vice president of product and design for Google Assistant. The senior executive previously held several other leadership positions within 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 “home devices and experiences” will be transferred to the search giant’s Platforms and Devices business. The latter company is responsible for, among other things, the development of Google’s smart home devices and Pixel handsets.

The team responsible for the search giant’s Gemini consumer chatbot is also affected by the reorganization. The unit will be part of the Google DeepMind artificial intelligence research laboratory. The latter group is led by Demis Hassabis, who won Nobel Prize in Chemistry this year with two other scientists for his work on the AlphaFold2 protein structure prediction system.

The Gemini chatbot is based on a range of large language models, also called Gemini, developed by Google DeepMind. “Bringing teams together will improve feedback loops, enable rapid deployment of our new models in the Gemini app, make our post-training work more efficient, and build on the tremendous momentum of our products,” explained Pichai.

Photo: Google