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If Google's 2024 could be neatly summed up, it would be: AI, AI, AI. After a turbulent 2023 filled with restructures, layoffs and pivots, this year saw the search giant start to turn the narrative around and reassert itself as a leader in artificial intelligence.
It was also a big year for executive shuffles. While Alphabet saw some new faces and some departures, the most interesting personnel changes happened with executive shuffles that stayed inside Alphabet's walls. That included Google getting a new head of search and a new boss for Europe. The company also got a new chief financial officer this year and saw several changes in its Cloud unit.
Here are the biggest joiners, leavers, and movers of 2024.
Joined: Anat Ashkenazi
Google hired a new chief financial officer this year. Anat Ashkenazi came from pharmaceutical firm Eli Lilly, where she spent the last three years as its CFO. Her appointment at Alphabet was nearly a year in the making, after the company's long-tenured CFO, Ruth Porat, announced last year that she would step into a new role overseeing investments and the company's long-term bets.
Ashkenazi arrived at a company facing a different set of challenges, the biggest being its aggressive push in AI and existential threats to its search business from competitors such as OpenAI. Some investors hope that Ashkenazi's arrival will increase transparency in growing Google businesses, such as AI and subscriptions.
Joined (again): Noam Shazeer
In 2017, Noam Shazeer and several other researchers co-authored a paper that detailed the ideas now being used to drive the generative AI boom. Shazeer quit Google in 2021, frustrated the company had let rivals such as OpenAI capitalize on his work and did not seize the potential themselves. He cofounded a new AI startup, Character.AI.
This year, Google brought Shazeer back, reportedly paying an eye-popping $2.7 billion to license Character.AI's technology, a deal that included bringing Shazeer and Character.AI cofounder Daniel De Freitas back to Google. Shazeer has been working on improving the reasoning abilities of Google's Gemini model. In December the company revealed an experimental model "trained to think out loud."
Left: Shailesh Prakash
When longtime Washington Post data chief Shailesh Prakash left in 2022 to join Google, it was considered a huge boon to the search giant's news business and potentially a way to salve tensions between Google News and publishers. Prakash departed in November this year amid a more complicated online publishing landscape that grapples with AI companies taking and using their content — Google being one of them.
(Disclosure: Axel Springer, the owner of Business Insider, is one of the media groups that filed a lawsuit against Google in February, alleging they suffered losses due to the company's digital advertising practices.)
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Left: Matt Brittin
Matt Brittin joined Google in 2007 and helped build the search giant's UK business before rising to oversee all of Google's Europe, Middle East, and Africa operations. In October, Brittin announced he intended to step down and appoint a successor, who in December was confirmed to be Debbie Weinstein. Brittin won't officially depart Google until early 2025.
"It's a pivotal moment to be passing the baton," wrote Brittin in a LinkedIn post announcing his plans to step down.
"We're only just starting to glimpse the transformative benefit that AI will have on billions of lives - and people in our part of the world are showing the way," he added.
Left: Adaire Fox-Martin
In March, Equinix announced it had appointed Adaire Fox-Martin as its next president and CEO, ending her near-three-year stint at Google. She joined the search giant in 2021 as its EMEA cloud president before being appointed to run its international and Ireland business the following year.
Left: Bob Frati
In August, Bob Frati left his role as VP of sales for Workspace after just over a year at Google. Before Google, he was Slack's chief sales and success officer.
Left: Amit Zavery
Google Cloud VP and head of platform Amit Zavery left the company in October to become COO of ServiceNow. He spent almost 25 years at Oracle before he joined Google.
"Helping grow Google Cloud from $7.3B to over $41B in annualized revenue and contributing to the creation of the world's fourth-largest enterprise software company has been a career-defining privilege," Zavery wrote on LinkedIn in a post announcing his departure.
Moved: Prabhakar Raghavan
One of Google's biggest leadership changes happened in October when the company's head of search, Prabhakar Raghavan, stepped down. As Google's search lead, Raghavan had also overseen ads, maps, commerce, and Google's voice assistant — responsibilities now falling to Nick Fox, who was elevated to the role. Raghavan's new position is chief technologist, reporting directly to CEO Sundar Pichai in a role that takes him back to his "computer science roots," per a memo from Pichai to the company in October. Raghavan joined Google in 2012 and worked on the company's ads business before taking on Search in 2020.
Moved: Nick Fox
Nick Fox now runs Google's core search and advertising business, potentially putting him in line for the CEO chair one day. Fox, a longtime executive who joined Google in 2003, has worked on products including Google Fi and Assistant. In 2022, he was appointed interim head of Google's commerce business, which he now oversees in his elevated role.
"I frequently turn to Nick to tackle our most challenging product questions, and he consistently delivers progress with tenacity, speed, and optimism," said Pichai in a memo to the company in October.
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Moved: Debbie Weinstein
In December, Debbie Weinstein became one of Google's most powerful people, taking the reins of the search giant's Europe, Middle East, and Africa businesses—and the nearly 30,000 employees that come with them. Weinstein, who has been at Google for just over a decade, was most recently VP and managing director of Google UK and Ireland.
She'll have her work cut out for her in handling European regulators and rolling out Google's many new AI products worldwide.
"This moment is a really exciting one for us — as we continue to drive remarkable breakthroughs in AI to make sure everyone across our region and the world will benefit from this technology," she wrote on LinkedIn.
Moved: Aparna Pappu
Google's head of Workspace stepped down in October, BI first reported. Aparna Pappu, who led the unit from July 2022, said she was ready for her "next opportunity" at Google and announced cloud applications president Jerry Dischler would lead Workspace going forward. Under Pappu's watch, Google has infused its Workspace product with AI, although it has struggled along the way. Google's new Gemini 2.0 features may be the shot in the arm Workspace needs.
