Mumbai, August 8, 2026: Google has significant changes in its AI leadership as the company seeks to accelerate its speed in the competition for AI leadership in the global market. Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai announced a new organizational model that assigns more responsibility to co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, to a broader strategic position while shifting the day to day running of Google DeepMind to Koray Kavukcuoglu, longtime CEO of AI.
The updates arrive amid Google’s own report of robust demand for its AI offerings and competing offers from other firms like OpenAI and Anthropic. Pichai said that the company aims to speed up its AI advancements but will continue to focus on research and development of artificial general intelligence (AGI).
In the new arrangement, Hassabis will be the new Chair of Google DeepMind and new Chief Scientist of Alphabet. He will stay on as CEO of Isomorphic Labs, a drug-discovery firm that DeepMind has spun out. He is leaving day-to-day operations to spend more time on AGI and long-term research and the broader implications of the advanced AI technology, Hassabis said.
Kavukcuoglu, a former chief technology officer of Google DeepMind, will be a Senior Vice President in Google DeepMind, reporting directly to Pichai. He will oversee Gemini model development, frontier AI research, as well as the Gemini app and developer teams.
Kavukcuoglu will have a central role in bringing Google’s AI research into products like this one. His deepening relationship with Google Cloud and product creation may help to bring Gemini a bit closer to a commercialized trajectory, Reuters reported.
The other big news is the departure of one of Google’s most important technical leaders, Jeff Dean, who has been with Google for 27 years. Dean and Google Senior Fellow Sanjay Ghemawat are founding an independent public-benefit organization for leveraging AI to speed up machine learning and science/engineering research. Google will be a founding investor and Cloud partner to their new venture, Google said.
The leadership changes follow a robust growth of Google’s AI business. At the end of second quarter 2026, Alphabet reported a revenue increase of 24% compared to the same period last year, and Google Cloud revenue growth was 82%, due in part to AI infrastructure and services demand. Google added that over 9 million developers are using its AI models monthly and its model APIs process approximately 22 billion tokens per minute.
The Gemini app has also emerged as a big component of Google’s AI strategy, with over 950 million MAUs. Google has announced that its open-source Gemma models have downloaded over 900 million times, while the company is working on a new generation of models, called Gemini.
