Skift Power Rankings: Sundar Pichai

Power is not just about who holds the top job but who shapes the landscape, drives innovation, and sets the agenda for what comes next. With that in mind, we proudly present Skift’s Power Rankings — our list of the most powerful leaders in travel.

Sundar Pichai is CEO of one of the largest and most powerful companies in the world: Google. The company’s growing Flights, Hotels, Vacation Rentals, Maps, and other businesses have made the tech giant a powerhouse in travel as well. 

Booking Holdings and Expedia Group are spending billions of dollars on Google advertising annually. Why? Because they rely on Google to attract customers.

But beyond its own travel businesses, Google’s search advertising business has had a make-or-break impact on a variety of companies, like Tripadvisor, Kayak, Yelp, and Expedia, for example. All of these companies have protested over the years the way Google harmed their businesses by deemphasizing free, organic search results.

When Pichai’s teams change an algorithm or introduce a travel advertising product, the travel industry around the world feels the repercussions. For example, metasearch engine Trivago complained in July that it was still feeling the adverse impact of changes to Google Hotels and advertising formats that Pichai’s Google introduced a year earlier.

As Google expands its presence in travel, other companies in the industry are being forced to rethink their business strategies in the face of competition. 

Google is now one of the leaders of generative AI with its Gemini model. The company has already started integrating that into various travel-related services, including various trip planning tools in Search and Maps — with much more surely to come. 

As Pichai said during Google’s latest developer conference, “Google is fully in our Gemini era.”

Pichai started at Google as a product manager in 2004, receiving several promotions until taking his current role in 2015.

Key to his rise was the success of his pitch to the company’s founders for Google Chrome, which launched in 2008 and went on to overtake Internet Explorer and Firefox as the most-used web browser. 

Pichai’s time at Google has not been without controversy. He appeared before the U.S. Congress in 2018 to answer sometimes heated questions about privacy, data collection, and relations with China. And he apologized in 2020 after quickly firing an ethics leader after she sent an email criticizing biases in AI and the company’s lack of progress in hiring women and minorities.

Pichai (born Pichai Sundararajan) lives in California with his wife and two children.