Thought Leader Interview: John Hennessy

Google co-founder Larry Page has described Alphabet as “a collection of companies.” What does that entail at the moment?

Our current holdings vary from things that are very much in a state of early development — mostly inside our R&D facility, Google X — and companies that are further along, like Waymo (our self-driving technology development company) and Verily (which focuses on healthcare and disease prevention research). Both of these are beginning to deliver products to market and moving from the initial research prototype phase into the product phase.

We were motivated to do the restructuring in 2015 because we felt that one of the key challenges successful companies face, as they go into their second and third decade, is to diversify the suite of products they offer. The mainline product — in our case, Google Search — and the things supporting it can undermine your ability to build out new product lines. The whole focus behind Alphabet and Google X was to enable the company to diversify and grow — not just via acquisitions, but to have an organic growth strategy to accompany that.

Google has promised to bring the benefits of artificial intelligence (AI) to everyone around the globe. That is a bold promise; how are you going about it?

It is a huge undertaking, and we’re going about it with a two-pronged strategy. First, by investing in and developing the fundamental technology. The AI breakthrough is basically about five years old, so we’re still early on in terms of developing the basic technology. Strategy one is to continue to develop that. The second part is to broaden