Google on Monday named Preeti Lobana to head its India division, occupying a crucial role left vacant since Sanjay Gupta was elevated to president of Asia-Pacific in July.
In the face of growing competition in the digital industry, Lobana, a former Google vice president of advertising technology, assumes leadership as the business promotes its AI products in India. She started working at Google in 2016.
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India’s importance to Google
One of Google’s most important international markets is India, where the company has invested billions to help hundreds of millions of Indians connect to the Internet and digitalise small businesses. 2020, the company promised to invest an additional $10 billion in India.
But in the world’s second-largest internet and telecom market, the search engine behemoth is also under increasing regulatory scrutiny. In 2022, India fined Google $162 million for engaging in anti-competitive Android activities. Having determined that the Android manufacturer had misused the Google Play Store’s dominating position in the nation, where over 95 percent of handsets run Android, it levied another penalty of $113 million.
The Indian antitrust authority launched a second probe against Alphabet’s Google in March of this year, claiming the tech behemoth had applied its in-app pricing guidelines in a “discriminatory” and “unfair” manner.
Roma Datta Chobey, the temporary head of the company’s digital business segment, will lead again.
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Lobana’s professional background
Lobana worked in banking for much longer than most before joining Google, having held positions at Standard Chartered, American Express, and NatWest.
“This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to use AI to shape the future, opening up previously unheard-of possibilities for companies to increase productivity, address pressing issues, and develop creative solutions,” she said in a LinkedIn post.