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Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai has recorded a video message for IIT Kharagpur as the institute turns 75, and he spends most of it on the small stuff. Nights spent studying in room B-308. Pichai, who graduated in 1993 with a B.Tech in metallurgical engineering, uses the anniversary to set out where he thinks artificial intelligence lands over the next five years, and to make a case that universities, not just tech companies, will decide whether any of it reaches people who aren’t already using it.
Campus, he said, is also where he met his wife Anjali, where he first learned to program, and where he carried floppy disks around to get time on one of the few machines available. “These moments shaped the course of my life,” he said, “putting me on a path to Google. Meals at Harry’s. The Illu festival. The wingmates, and the professors who stuck with him. That last line is the pivot. The message, posted by IIT Kharagpur on X, works as two things at once—a nostalgia reel and a forecast. It also tracks with where Alphabet has pointed itself. Under Pichai, AI now runs through Search, Cloud and the Gemini family of models a shift the company’s own regulatory filings describe as central to its strategy. A prediction about AI spreading into everyday work is, conveniently, also a description of Google’s product roadmap.
He joined Google in 2004, worked on Toolbar and Chrome before taking charge of product and engineering across its major platforms, became CEO in 2015, and added Alphabet in December 2019.
Much of the current momentum, he said, is coming from students. He recalled meeting Gemini Student Ambassadors from across India at the AI Impact Summit in Delhi this year: “Their enthusiasm for how technology can improve lives was palpable, and it’s why I’m so optimistic about the future. The role of IIT Kharagpur, he added, “will only grow in importance as you lead the next wave of technology. After Kharagpur, Pichai went to Stanford and then Wharton.