Sundar Pichai Sees Google's Future in the Smartest Cloud

Two days before delivering the keynote at Google I/O, the company's annual State of the Union address, Sundar Pichai is worried about losing his voice. Sitting at the coffee table inside his remarkably spartan office at company headquarters, the Google CEO speaks softly, even by his standards. Step by careful step, he explains the major themes that will run through his keynote speech, and at first, they seem less weighty than they should, considering they represent the near-future of the world's largest internet business. That's partly because Pichai isn't feeling too well and partly because those themes aren't all that different from the themes that drove last year's speech. Google, he keeps saying, is now an "AI-first company."