Sundar Pichai

As the CEO of Alphabet, Sundar Pichai helms one of the world's most powerful tech conglomerates, with best-of-breed businesses such as Google, YouTube, Android, and Waymo self-driving cars under its flag, along with a market cap in excess of $2 trillion. But Pichai, who joined Google in 2004 and rose through the ranks to succeed cofounder Larry Page at the top job, knows that he can’t sit still. Antitrust regulators are itching to break up the company, which generated $74 billion in profit last year, while the advent of generative AI threatens to undercut the search advertising business that produced much of that profit. Pichai has shaken up the company’s internal AI teams in a series of reorgs. In August, he licensed startup Character.AI’s chatbot technology, rehiring the founder—a former Googler—as part of the deal. The reported price tag: $2.7 billion.