HTLS 2021: Sundar Pichai sees bright future for India, touches upon data privacy

Google CEO Sundar Pichai, part of the increasingly long list of Indian nationals who are at the helm of big American companies said that the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) pandemic accelerated digital transformation and a lot of it is going to stay. He was speaking on the new world order on Hindustan Times Leadership Summit to Hindustan Times Editor-in-chief R Sukumar. He also touched upon how Google and its parent company Alphabet navigate through regulations in different countries.

Pichai also said that computing will adapt naturally to people and be more immersive.

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“Over time computing will adapt naturally to people, be more immersive and ambient, not as a black rectangle (in the form a mobile phone). The future will be AR (Augmented Reality). You see elements of it in watches right now. And to do all that, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is going to play a big part in it. We are working on it - Google Lambda is one such product, which will be using AI to understand what is being said (speech) and lead to conversation,” said Pichai.

Talking about the future of Google, Pichai said that AI is the future of the company. “We are building cutting-edge AI. It has immense applications - I have seen it in research around cancer and medicines. We are still researching but what we are excited about it to bring it to the world through Google Cloud.”

The 49-year-old said that he is very excited about the future of India.

“It is heartening to see a number of start-ups in India that are proving themselves at the global stage. We want to support companies in India. We want to provide them with AI and technology so that they can scale up their operations,” said Pichai.

“I see India as a place where people build things and take it globally. That’s why we invested in Google Pay, and we are doing it in other markets also. We want to play the enabling role - be it supporting the market and providing technological platform,” he added.

As the conversation moved towards another important topic - data privacy and regulations - Pichai said the company always strives to find the middle path which benefits itself as well as the countries.

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"It's important for Google to be local and engage in every country with the best interest of that country. That's an important principal with which I approach the issue. As part of that, where we can encourage commonality, we strive to do that," said the Google CEO.

Talking about privacy, Pichai said Google is advocating for General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR, a regulation on data protection and privacy in the European Union and the European Economic Area.

Pichai was born in Tamil Nadu's Madurai, according to news agency Reuters, and grew up in Chennai. He joined Google in 2004 and was appointed the CEO in 2015.