About Ruth Porat
Ruth Porat, President and Chief Investment Officer at Alphabet and Google, discussed the company's AI strategy and societal impact in several recent appearances. In a June 2026 episode of the podcast "Ruthie's Table 4," Porat described Google's approach to food as a tool for building community and fostering serendipity among employees. She also highlighted the company's work on health equity, citing a diabetic retinopathy screening program that has provided 700,000 scans in the global south with a target of 6 million. Porat referenced Demis Hassabis's Nobel Prize for AlphaFold, stating that the decision to open-source the protein-folding tool reflected the principle that "if we can, we must" address intractable societal problems.
At a Fast Company event in May 2026, Porat discussed the launch of Gemini 3 and the "agentic era" of AI. She argued that the greatest threat to national security regarding AI is "anxiety in America about AI more than anything else," and emphasized the need to communicate both the upside benefits and the protections against downside risks. Porat noted that about half of small businesses are now using AI and seeing revenue and profitability improvements. She also advised leaders not to rely too heavily on external assessments, urging them to stay focused on execution whether the company is perceived to be at the top or bottom of its cycle.
Source: AI-verified profile updated from Ruth Porat's recent appearances.
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✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
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Interviewer0:03
I was asked yesterday I was on Radio 4 talking about food. And the person who interviewed me said, you know, it's all very, very important for you all to make delicious food, to make food that tastes good, that has ingredients, but there's a huge part of the world that has no food. You know that we have governments that don't worry about the lack of food in schools and, you know, in inner cities where there are no shops.
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Ruth Porat0:30
Well, you know my colleague Demis Hassabis who won the Nobel Prize. And he won it for something that I think is really exciting because he and the team, he won it jointly with another colleague from the States, John Jumper. They said, you know what, let's take on this 50-year grand challenge on protein folding. Because if you can actually understand protein folding, it starts to help with understanding the building blocks of life and therefore helps accelerate drug discovery. So they go on this journey and create AlphaFold and then conclude let's open source it to the world. So now 3 and a half million scientists in 190 countries are using it. Why is this relevant to what you just said? When he received the Nobel Prize, he was asked, why did you choose this? And he said, with AI we can take on the most intractable problems in society. And the way I look at it when I ever see this kind of data that we're talking about is if we can, we must. You know, and so what are the most intractable things in society that can make a difference for society? In health, in education, in food, in climate, in crisis. You know, and we can address it. Like that to me is like if we can, we must. And we will and we must, right? The research and fund research, you know.
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Interviewer1:54
Important part of it. We have to keep up the research.
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Ruth Porat1:56
And come from, feel they have ability to travel. I have a very close friend I told you who is in a small town in Italy and the concept was, you know, from all of us, you know, we have to get her to New York because of a health issue. She would not have the benefit of a kind of wealth that you will find in a large city. And the interesting experience for us last week was that the communication through science, the communication of what was being done on an operating table on 84th Street could be transferred to a university hospital in Siena, you know. And so that communication through technology is saving lives.
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Interviewer2:47
Well, I think that's another critical area we're focused on which is, you know, across America, across the UK, across Italy, everybody should have access to the same knowledge and insight that can make a difference in health outcomes. We're doing some work that, and you're absolutely right, through technology, that's got to be a critical element of it. We're doing work across the global south which goes to your point which is there's a disease called diabetic retinopathy, blindness from diabetes. And with very simple early testing, and you don't need to be a doctor to do it, you can tell if somebody is on the path to lose their vision from diabetes and can intervene and make a difference. And that's a great example where we say, you don't need cutting edge doctors in London to save someone's eyesight. We can do it working with local partners. So we've now given 700,000 scans in the global south. We're targeting 6 million scans, touching 6 million people where you can intervene and potentially save their eyesight. That's an example of you don't need to come to your point a major hospital somewhere. We just need to partner with the right people across the globe.
