Ruth Porat

President & Chief Investment Officer, Alphabet

Search every verified Ruth Porat interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Ruth Porat, President and Chief Investment Officer at Alphabet and Google, has recently discussed the economic and societal potential of artificial intelligence, as well as the energy infrastructure required to support it. In a CNBC-hosted forum with IBM Chairman Arvind Krishna, Porat said she believes AI could add approximately $4 trillion to U.S. GDP over several years and cited data that 80% of small businesses using AI report an uplift in revenue and profitability. She described AI as a tool that will reshape tasks rather than eliminate careers, and emphasized the need for job skilling efforts to ease workforce transitions. Porat also highlighted AI’s role in advancing science, pointing to Google’s AlphaFold as an example of open-sourced research used by 3.5 million scientists across 190 countries. On energy, Porat stated that data centers currently use about 4% of the U.S. grid, with projections rising to roughly 12%, but argued they are not the primary driver of rising electricity prices. She cited a Lawrence Berkeley National Labs study indicating that electricity prices have grown more slowly in states with data centers. Porat noted that China has built 80 times more transmission capacity than the United States in the last decade, and said that without sufficient energy infrastructure, the U.S. risks falling behind in delivering AI’s benefits. In other appearances, Porat discussed Google’s use of office food and “casual collisions” to foster innovation, and shared personal stories about her father’s background as a Holocaust survivor and physicist. She also addressed health disparities, stating that treatable cancer survival rates can be 50% lower depending on a patient’s postal code, and described Google’s work using AI to screen for diabetic retinopathy in the global south.