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

- Miguel Helft

For music fans, the 22,000-seat shoreline Amphitheatre in Silicon Valley is iconic. Legendary concert promoter Bill Graham designed it with inspiration from the Grateful Dead logo, and that band played here 39 times. Neil Young, the Bee Gees, Bruce Springsteen 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 on stage. 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 rockstar, the headline act. As he took in the hoots and cheers from the crowd of software developers, 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 co-founder Larry Page was after when he handpicked Pichai last year to take over one of the greatest tech franchises of all time.