Tech giant Google has changed its leadership and the company has promoted Nick Fox to an important role as the new head of its search and ads division. Fox takes over the position that Prabhakar Raghavan vacates, who held that role since 2018. Raghavan will become chief technologist, guiding the technical direction across the organization. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai explained this transition in a blog post. According to him, Raghavan comes with over twelve years of a leadership tenure for teams within Google. “Prabhakar has decided it’s time to make a big leap in his own career,” noted Pichai, referring to Raghavan’s future contributions towards furthering Google’s culture of technological excellence.

He has been with Google since 2003 and is currently vice president of product and design for Google Assistant. Fox played a critical role in the formation of the company’s product strategy around AI for the last few years. Pichai said Fox will oversee leadership for the Knowledge and Information team, which combines search, ads, and commerce products. “Nick has been instrumental in shaping Google’s AI product roadmap and working closely with Prabhakar,” Pichai added.

This succession would help Google structure and become more agile in the competitive AI landscape, especially considering multiple antitrust lawsuits against it related to its search and advertising practices. In addition, Pichai stated that the team responsible for Google’s Gemini application for direct-to-consumer AI products will be integrated with Google DeepMind, led by Demis Hassabis, in an effort to streamline processes and to enhance cooperation, which is going to lead to quicker deployment of new models within the Gemini framework.

More importantly, the devices and home experiences teams are now going to be housed in the Platforms and Devices unit, thus much better brought in line with the products they will create. This shows Google’s desire to be on top of the rapidly changing technology arena.