Sundar Pichai

Chief Executive Officer & Director, Alphabet

Search every verified Sundar Pichai interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Sundar Pichai delivered the 2026 commencement address at Stanford University on June 14, where he acknowledged "global conflicts, economic anxiety, a rewiring of technology, information overload" and said that "each generation has faced hardship in their own way." During the speech, approximately 200 students walked out in protest, reportedly over Google's involvement in Project Nimbus, a cloud computing contract with the Israeli government. Pichai continued his address, telling graduates to "choose optimism," "gravitate towards working on hard things," and "do the thing that excites you." Earlier in May, Pichai spoke at Google I/O 2026, where he described the event as laying "the foundation for agentic transformation across our products." In interviews following the conference, he said that Google's models are "at the frontier in some areas" but that the company is "a bit behind" in agentic coding and long-horizon tasks. He also stated that "three years from now, you would look back at what we had today and you will realize they were pretty primitive," comparing current AI to a "flip phone."