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........

© Fast Company