Thomas Kurian

Kurian’s family hails from Pampady in Kottayam district, Kerala, India; because his father worked in Bangalore, he grew up there with his identical twin and two other siblings. He was admitted to the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), and six months later went on to study at Princeton UniversityPrinceton UniversityPrinceton University is a private university and Ivy League member in Princeton, New Jersey. Chartered on October 22, 1746 as the College of New Jersey, it moved to Princeton in 1756 and adopted its present name in 1896. Undergraduate education leads to A.B. and B.S.E. degrees and emphasizes small-group discussion, independent research and residential college life. Graduate education spans the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and engineering. As of October 2026, Christopher L. Eisgruber was president. Its 2026–27 operating budget was $3.407 billion, including $342 million for undergraduate aid.Open the full entry in the United States.⁠[1][1][1]

He earned a BSEE in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Princeton University, graduating summa cum laude, and later received an MBA from Stanford University, where he was an Arjay Miller Scholar.⁠[2]

Before joining Oracle, Kurian worked at McKinseyMcKinsey & CompanyMcKinsey & Company is a management consulting firm headquartered in New York, United States. It was founded in Chicago in 1926 by University of Chicago professor James O. McKinsey and, after Marvin Bower established its “professional service” principles, grew into one of the largest pure consulting firms in the world; as of October 2026 it has more than 100 offices in over 50 countries and about 40,000 employees. It has also repeatedly faced regulatory investigations and public criticism over episodes such as its work with Enron, a former leader’s insider trading case, and its consulting for opioid manufacturers.Open the full entry as a business analyst and engagement manager.⁠[2][3]

In 1996, Kurian joined Oracle, where he subsequently held various positions.⁠[4]

From March 1999 to February 2001, Kurian served as Vice President of Development in Oracle’s Server Technologies division.⁠[4]

From February 2001 to July 2009, Kurian was Oracle’s Senior Vice President of Development.⁠[4]

In July 2009, Kurian became Oracle’s Executive Vice President, Product Development, a post he held until January 2015; Oracle’s fiscal 2010 annual report listed his age as 43.⁠[5][4]

In January 2015, Kurian was promoted to President, Product Development at Oracle. The appointment came nearly four months after Larry Ellison stepped down as chief executive and became executive chairman; his family in Kerala and then Kerala Chief Minister Oommen Chandy publicly congratulated him.⁠[4][1][1][1]

As president of product development, Kurian was regarded as Oracle’s main technical leader after Ellison; he did not report to co-chief executives Safra CatzSafra CatzSafra Catz is executive vice chair of Oracle’s board and served as its CEO from 2014 to 2025. She moved from investment banking to the software industry in 1999 and has worked across finance, operations and acquisition strategy, including Oracle’s PeopleSoft takeover. A former HSBC and Disney director, she also teaches and supports education initiatives. She was appointed to the U.S. President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology in 2026.Open the full entry and Mark Hurd but directly to Ellison, and he was responsible for leading Oracle’s transition to cloud-based enterprise software.⁠[6][6][3]

In Oracle’s fiscal 2018 (ended May 31, 2018), Kurian was a named executive officer alongside Ellison, Catz and Hurd, and his equity award consisted entirely of performance-based stock options: he was granted 14 million options at an exercise price of $51.13 per share, earnable only on meeting stock-price, market-capitalization and cloud-growth goals, and intended to represent five years of equity compensation. The proxy statement listed his total fiscal-year compensation as $73,799,890, including a base salary of $800,000.⁠[7][7][7][7]

On September 5, 2018, Kurian announced a leave of absence, thanking employees in an email for helping to push the company’s cloud computing efforts. An Oracle spokesperson later said the company expected him to return soon, and chief executive Mark Hurd said on a conference call that month that he expected Kurian to return from his leave.⁠[8][6][3][8]

According to a person familiar with the matter, Kurian and Ellison disagreed over Oracle’s cloud strategy: Kurian favored making more Oracle software available to run on the public clouds of chief rivals such as Amazon and Microsoft, to reduce reliance on Oracle’s own cloud infrastructure, while Ellison opposed this.⁠[8][8]

On September 28, 2018, Kurian informed Oracle that he was resigning as President, Product Development, effective immediately, to pursue other opportunities; Oracle filed a Form 8-K with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that day stating that his duties had been reassigned to other senior executives in its development organization.⁠[9][9]

His departure ended a 22-year career at Oracle, where he was the company’s fourth-highest leader at the time he left. At the time, Oracle lagged behind Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Salesforce in several key cloud-computing segments.⁠[8][8][8]

On November 17, 2018, then Google Cloud chief executive Diane Greene announced that Kurian would join Google Cloud on November 26 and transition into its leadership role in early 2019; Greene said that she, Sundar Pichai and Urs Hölzle had all interviewed Kurian and that she believed he would take Google Cloud to the next level, and that she would remain chief executive through January 2019 to ensure a smooth transition.⁠[10][10][10][10]

Kurian joined Google in November 2018 as chief executive of Google Cloud, the Google division that brings Google’s technology and solutions to enterprises, governments and startups.⁠[2][2]

In April 2019, Kurian hosted the Google Cloud Next ’19 keynote as the new chief executive. On the first day, Google Cloud introduced Anthos, a hybrid cloud platform for managing applications consistently across on-premises data centers and multiple clouds, announcing its general availability on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and GKE On-Prem and plans to extend it to third-party clouds such as AWS and Azure; it also introduced the serverless computing platform Cloud Run.⁠[11][11][11][11][11]

On June 6, 2019, Kurian announced that Google had signed a definitive agreement to acquire Looker, a platform for business intelligence, data applications and embedded analytics, which would join Google Cloud once the deal closed. He wrote that Looker would extend Google Cloud’s business analytics offering, enabling organizations to define business metrics consistently across data sources.⁠[12][12][12]

On February 3, 2020, Alphabet reported its fourth-quarter and full-year 2019 results, listing Google Cloud revenue separately: $4.056 billion, $5.838 billion and $8.918 billion for 2017 through 2019, and $2.614 billion for the fourth quarter of 2019, compared with $1.709 billion a year earlier.⁠[13][13]

On February 13, 2020, Kurian announced that Google had completed its acquisition of Looker and said that Looker customers and partners could continue to use cloud data management systems such as Amazon Redshift, Azure SQL, Snowflake and Oracle.⁠[14][14]

On September 12, 2022, Google completed its acquisition of the cybersecurity company Mandiant, Inc., which joined Google Cloud and kept its brand. Kurian said the acquisition would enable the company to deliver a comprehensive, best-in-class cybersecurity solution, and that Google Cloud and Mandiant would together “help reinvent how organizations protect themselves, as well as detect and respond to threats.”⁠[15][15][15][15]

Alphabet’s first-quarter 2023 results showed Google Cloud revenue of $7.454 billion for the quarter, up from $5.821 billion a year earlier, and operating income of $191 million, compared with an operating loss of $706 million a year earlier (both on a recast basis).⁠[16][16][16][16]

On March 18, 2025, Google announced a definitive agreement to acquire the New York–based cloud security platform Wiz for $32 billion in cash, subject to closing adjustments, with Wiz to join Google Cloud once the deal closed. Kurian presented the deal that day in a webcast with Sundar Pichai and others, saying Google Cloud and Wiz shared a joint vision to make cybersecurity more accessible and simpler to use for organizations of any size and industry.⁠[17][17][17][17]

Opening Next ’25 on April 9, 2025, Kurian said Google Cloud and Workspace had delivered more than 3,000 product advancements in 2024, that more than 4 million developers were building with Gemini models, and that Vertex AI usage had grown 20-fold in a year; Google Cloud’s infrastructure had grown to 42 regions. He also announced Cloud WAN, making Google’s global private network available to all Google Cloud customers.⁠[18][18][18][18][18]

On October 9, 2025, Kurian announced Gemini Enterprise, calling it “the new front door for AI in the workplace,” bringing Google’s AI to every employee through a chat interface, with a no-code workbench and pre-built agents. He also said nine of the top ten AI labs used Google Cloud and that 65% of Google Cloud customers were using its AI products.⁠[19][19][19][19][19]

On March 11, 2026, Google announced it had completed its acquisition of Wiz, which joined Google Cloud while keeping its brand, with its products continuing to support major clouds including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud. Kurian said: “We want to make security a catalyst for innovation, not a barrier.”⁠[20][20][20][20]

In his Next ’26 keynote on April 22, 2026, Kurian announced the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform (a platform to build, scale, govern and optimize AI agents), eighth-generation TPUs, and Agentic Defense, which combines Google’s threat intelligence and security operations with Wiz’s cloud and AI security platform. Besides Gemini models, the platform offers AnthropicAnthropicAnthropic is an artificial intelligence research and product company founded in 2021 that develops the Claude models, assistant, and tools such as Claude Code, and operates as a public benefit corporation. Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei are its co-founders, and its research covers model safety, interpretability, and steerability.Open the full entry’s Claude models, and support for Claude Opus 4.7 was added that day.⁠[21][21][21][21]

In the keynote he said nearly 75% of Google Cloud customers were using its AI products and that over the previous 12 months 330 customers had each processed more than one trillion tokens.⁠[21][21]

Alphabet’s second-quarter 2026 results showed Google Cloud revenue up 82% year over year to $24.8 billion, driven mainly by demand for enterprise AI solutions and AI infrastructure; operating income for the quarter was $8.814 billion, compared with $2.826 billion a year earlier.⁠[22][22]

On October 8, 2026, in his Gemini at Work 2026 keynote, Kurian launched the Gemini agent, describing it as a “single, universal agent for work”: it answers questions, handles knowledge work, creates images and media, and writes and runs code, with chat, tasks and code in a single agent and a single API. He said: “You give it objectives, not instructions.” Users can delegate an outcome and come back to finished work.⁠[23][23][23][23]

According to the announcement, the Gemini agent can act as a personal assistant or as a team member working on behalf of a group or a specific role; it works directly inside Gmail, Drive, Docs, Slides, Sheets, Chat and Calendar, can dynamically create sub-agents to coordinate multi-step tasks, and chooses the best-fitting model for each job between Google’s Gemini family and Anthropic’s Claude models.⁠[23][23][23][23]

Kurian also said that nearly 500 Google Cloud customers had each processed more than one trillion tokens in the past year; as of October 2026, nearly 80% of Google Cloud customers were using its AI products and nearly 90% of the Fortune 100 used Gemini Enterprise.⁠[23]

Kurian has served on the Stanford Graduate School of Business Advisory Council and serves on the Advisory Council of Princeton University’s School of Engineering.⁠[2]

Google Cloud: Official website: https://cloud.google.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[23]