38 | FORBES ASIA JULY 2016ETHAN PINES FOR FORBESF
or music fans the 22,000-seat Shoreline amphi-
theater in Silicon Valley is iconic. Legendary con-
cert promoter Bill Graham designed it with inspi-
ration from the Grateful Dead logo, and that band
played here 39 times. Neil Young, the Bee Gees,
Bruce Spring steen—they’ve all graced the Shoreline stage. A
few weeks ago, accompanied by bouncy electronica music
and arcade-inspired videos flashing across giant screens, so
did Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
It would be an exaggeration to say he looked comfortable
as he walked onstage. The cerebral 43-year-old is built like a
straw, his eyes darting behind rectangular glasses, more Carl
Sagan than Carlos Santana. No matter. At the annual Google
I/O conference he was a rock star, the headline act. As he
took in the hoots and cheers from the crowd of software de-
velopers, his face eventually settled into a smile. “We live in
very, very exciting times. Computing has had an amazing
evolution,” Pichai said in his south Indian accent, stretching
amaaaaazing as a way to get the crowd going.
Okay, not exactly Steve Jobs. Or even Mark Zuckerberg or
Jeff Bezos or Tim Cook. Pichai is the classic insider CEO, a
low-profile, methodical brainiac who would rather geek out
over the future of computer science than whip up a crowd
of software developers with choreographed product demos.
And that’s exactly what Google cofounder Larry Page was
after when he handpicked Pichai last year to take over one of
the greatest tech franchises of all time.
The task at hand is monumental. With a market cap of
roughly half a trillion dollars, Google, or rather its parent, Al-
phabet, is the world’s second-most-valuable company, domi-nating vast swaths of the tech industry, including search, dig-
ital advertising, mobile and video. But Page and Pichai know
all too well that tech behemoths often lose their way when
they are strongest. And while earlier tech giants, from IBM to
BlackBerry, were felled by a single foe, Google faces a bruising
multifront war with the other four superpowers in tech. It’s
fighting Apple in mobile and Facebook in advertising, video
and communications. It’s pitted against Amazon in com-
merce, a resurgent Microsoft in business software, and Ama-
zon and Microsoft in cloud services.
Pichai wages all these battles amid a fundamental tech-
nological shift. As Google continues to navigate the transi-
tion from desktop to mobile, computing is already moving to
multiple screens and in some instances—such as with Echo,
Amazon’s surprise hit smart speaker—no screens. Interac-
tions with devices and apps are quickly becoming two-way
conversations, sometimes employing smart “bots” promot-
ed by Microsoft, Facebook and others. Unlike apps, these bots
run atop communications services like Facebook’s Messenger
(900 million users) or Microsoft’s Skype (300 million users).
Google has the wildly popular Gmail (more than 1 billion
users), but it lacks the kind of modern messaging system that
the younger set favors.
Pichai, however, believes this new tech world is tailor-
made for Google because of one thing: artificial intelligence.
Pretty much everyone can program simple, rudimentary con-
versations—Apple’s Siri was among the first—but to go be-
yond flashy “demo-ware” you need more sophisticated algo-
rithms. And artificial intelligence has been in Google’s wheel-
house for years. The company invested in fundamental build-Google Is About to
Change Everything—
Again
New CEO Sundar Pichai is a brainy product guy who aims to
reinvent the world’s second-most-valuable company—and pretty much
every digital experience—with a heavy dose of artificial intelligence.BY MIGUEL HELFTFORBES ASIA
GOOGLE