Meet Prabhakar Raghavan, IIT Madras alumnus spearheading Google's war with ChatGPT

ChatGPT has ignited a new artificial intelligence (AI) war between tech giants Google and Microsoft. As soon as Microsoft integrated OpenAI chatbot with Bing search, Google declared a "code red" and boosted AI development. Within a few days, Google introduced Bard, its answer to ChatGPT-backed Microsoft Bing search. Although Google has a huge team that is dedicatedly working to improvise Bard with each chat, a person at the frontline in this battle against ChatGPT is an Indian Institute of Technology, Madras alumnus Prabhakar Raghavan. Raghavan is currently handling the role of Senior Vice President at Google. He is responsible for Google Search, Assistant, Geo, Ads, Commerce and Payments products.

The 62-year-old India-born engineer turned executive, recently announced incentives for Google employees who help to improve Bard. Born and brought up in Bhopal, Raghavan did his schooling from Campion School and his mother was physics and math teacher. After his schooling, he secured his Bachelor of Technology degree from the IIT Madras and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Before joining Google, Prabhakar led Yahoo! Labs where he was responsible for search and ad ranking, as well as ad marketplace design, and later served as the company’s Chief Strategy Officer. He also served as CTO at Verity, and held various positions over the course of 14 years at IBM with a focus on algorithms, data mining and machine learning.

Prabhakar is one of the foremost authorities on Search and is the co-author of two widely-used graduate texts on algorithms and on search: Randomized Algorithms and Introduction to Information Retrieval. He has over 20 years of research spanning algorithms, web search and databases, published over 100 papers in various fields, and holds 20 issued patents, including several on link analysis for web search.

Previously, he served as Vice President of Google Apps, Google Cloud, overseeing engineering, products and user experience. Under his leadership, the Apps business expanded from a set of consumer apps to an enterprise solution that is a major contributor to Google’s Cloud business. He also grew both Gmail and Drive past 1 billion MAUs and introduced a number of machine intelligence features in G Suite, including Smart Reply, Smart Compose, Drive Quick Access — each leading to measurable improvements in user experience.

In 2018 he became responsible for the Ads & Commerce teams, including search, display and video advertising, analytics, shopping, payments, and travel. He’s helped drive double-digit growth, while remaining centered on longstanding principles of user trust and fair value exchange among users, publishers, and advertisers.