Business

The man behind Google Meet went from being ‘the only Indian kid in my class’ to connecting 3 billion users worldwide. He test-drives the product every day

Published

5 days ago

November 30, 2025

Awaneesh Verma leads Google Meet, Google Voice, and other real-time communication products at Alphabet, overseeing a massive network reaching about 3 billion users and 11 million companies worldwide.

However, his drive to eliminate communication friction and ensure people are “truly understanding each other” is rooted in a personal journey that stretches back before his time at Uber and Duolingo—to when he learned how barriers can keep people from communicating.

Born in the UK to parents who had immigrated from India, Verma spent his young childhood in the midlands city of Sheffield. He recalled in a recent interview with Fortune that, for the longest time, he was “the only Indian kid in my class.”

While his hometown is “a great place,” he couldn’t help but wonder “what the rest of the world felt and looked like.” He recalled how he was fascinated with a physical atlas in the days before Google Maps. “I’m like just looking at maps and drawing places based on that.”

Years later, when Verma was an engineering major at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, he heard Google’s head of engineering, Alan Eustace, give a talk about ongoing projects, including Google Translate. “I was like, ‘Wow, this is the future of connecting people.” Within a few years, Verma was working on Google Translate, part of a journey that took him to Duolingo as its first ever head of product, before a stop at Uber, also as head of project, and a return to Google.

Verma told Fortune that he loves his work because he has always loved the idea of something having to do with travel, saying he wanted to be a travel show host when he was a kid.

“I really liked the appeal of meeting people in different cultures and then truly understanding each other,” he said, adding that he’s been lucky to do a job that lets him do the same thing.

Beta-testing while driving the machine

As head of Google Meet, Verma told Fortune that he is always beta-testing his product, which billions of users depend on to do business. (Although more specifically, he said he’s always testing the product internally, from early research proof-of-concepts to end-user prototypes and beta.) He said the beauty of Google Meet is that it’s part of Google Workspace, which means that all the notes you take on it become part of your Google Drive.

Verma said he uses Take Notes with Gemini in “pretty much all of my meetings.” With a single click, this tool instantly creates a live Google document of meeting notes, which become the team’s “decision of record,” transforming discussions into something “durable and sticky.”

He noted that this reliability has made distributed collaboration easier, recalling a time when a third of his team in Stockholm felt confident skipping an inconvenient meeting, a huge change from just a few years ago. The team was trying to get some feedback from some Bay Area-based executives, but the timing just wasn’t right. Nevertheless, they felt confident in the meeting going on without them. “We trust that you’ll represent our point of view well and we’ll read the notes and we’ll read the transcript later on.”

The Google Meet chief also relayed that he often debriefs on projects, and he asks team members what went well and what could have gone differently. Once all of those are written on a whiteboard, he cross-references them with what the Gemini AI notetaker thought of the meeting. “When in doubt, you can go back and read the transcript,” he said, noting that Gemini includes citations, so the minute anything is in doubt, “there’s a one click to that part of the transcript where you can then just read what happened there.”

The goal is to use AI to facilitate the high fidelity of human conversation, including tone and emotion, allowing teams to reach resolutions faster than asynchronous communication. Verma illustrated this by recounting a 60-minute discussion with an engineering counterpart. By using Ask Gemini to summarize, they immediately produced a 15-bullet product specification.

Real-time translate

The innovations from Verma and his team spring to life when Fortune talks to Niklas Blum, a native German speaker based in Google’s aforementioned Stockholm office. He demonstrates Google’s real-time speech translator, a very different product from Google Translate.

“Don’t you hear me, Nick? I’m speaking German to you now,” Blum said, as this journalist could hear him speaking in the background in something that sounded Germanic, while, with a few seconds delay, his voice came through the speakers in English, somewhat uncannily.

Blum explained that AI technology has now progressed to the point where it clones his voice in real time to make it sound like he is talking in English.

He added that Verma’s team worked closely with Google’s DeepMind on the various technologies, with multiple layers of AI working: the translation plus the generation of the translated voice. To some extent, he said, the lag is very dependent on the language being translated, since the AI has to account for the grammar and complexity of the language being used. German often puts the verb toward the end of the sentence, for instance, so there is a lag as the AI makes sure it has the correct meaning.

This real-time translation tool came together over the course of about two years, Blum said, adding that it began as an exploration without a certain deadline. But the more they communicated with global companies that do business across language barriers, they saw a need in the marketplace.

He said it was “really hard” for team conversations across different languages to be held while making sure that everyone received all the correct information. “We want Google Meet to not only be a tool to connect people, but [something] that creates value in the conversation,” he added.

“The beauty of technology is not just the fact that it can automate and make it easier,” Verma said, but that you can trust “that it truly is neutrally representing everything that was said.”

There’s an imperative behind this, of course, somehow providing a fix to the post-pandemic onslaught of endless meetings that define most workdays.

Verma notes that these are often ineffective, leaving participants unsure of what was decided and what comes next. He said he feels a real need to address “meeting fatigue” that comes from meetings just not being run well.

Verma affirms that every improvement is filtered through the question, “how could we have helped them do this better?”

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Business

Stocks: Facing a vast wave of incoming liquidity, the S&P 500 prepares to surf to a new record high

Published

18 minutes ago

December 5, 2025

Jace Porter

The S&P 500 index ticked up 0.3% yesterday, its eighth straight upward trading session. It is now less than half a percentage point away from its record high, and futures were pointing marginally up again this morning. Nasdaq 100 futures were even more optimistic, up 0.39% before the open in New York. The VIX “fear” index (which measures volatility) has sunk 12.6% this month, indicating that investors seem to have settled in for a calm, quiet, risk-on holiday season.

They have reason to be happy. Washington is preparing a wave of incoming liquidity that is likely to generate fresh demand for equities.

For instance, the CME FedWatch index shows an 87% chance that the U.S. Federal Reserve will deliver an interest rate cut next week, delivering a new round of cheaper money. Further cuts are expected in 2026.

Furthermore, Wall Street largely expects President Trump to announce that Kevin Hassett will replace Fed chairman Jerome Powell in May—and Hassett is widely regarded as a dove who will lean in favor of further rate cuts.

Elsewhere, the Fed has begun a series of “reserve management purchases,” a program in which the central bank will buy short-term T-bills—a move that will add more liquidity to markets generally.

Banks, brokers and trading platforms are also lining up to handle ‘Trump Accounts,’ into which the U.S. government will deposit $1,000 for every child. The trust fund can be invested in low-cost stock index trackers—a new source of investment demand coming online in the back half of 2026.

So it’s no surprise that nine major investment banks polled by the Financial Times expect stocks to rise in 2026; the average of their estimates is by 10%.

The Congressional Budget Office also estimates that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act will add 0.9% to U.S. GDP next year largely because it allows companies to immediately deduct capital expenditures from their taxes—spurring a huge round of corporate spending.

With all that fresh money on the horizon, it’s clear why markets have shrugged off their worries about AI and Bitcoin. The only shock will be if the S&P fails to hit a new all-time high by the end of the year.

Here’s a snapshot of the markets ahead of the opening bell in New York this morning:

S&P 500 futures were up 0.2% this morning. The last session closed up 0.3%.
STOXX Europe 600 was up 0.3% in early trading.
The U.K.’s FTSE 100 was up 0.14% in early trading.
Japan’s Nikkei 225 was up 2.33%.
China’s CSI 300 was up 0.34%.
The South Korea KOSPI was down 0.19%.
India’s NIFTY 50 is up 0.18%.
Bitcoin was flat at $93K.

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Business

Gen Z fears AI will upend careers. Can leaders change the narrative?

Published

49 minutes ago

December 5, 2025

Jace Porter

Good morning. Are you communicating the purpose of AI with your younger employees? According to new data from Harvard, most fear AI is going to take their jobs.

The Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy School released the fall 2025 Harvard Youth Poll on Thursday, which finds a generation under profound strain. The nationwide survey of 2,040 Americans between 18 and 29 years old was conducted from Nov. 3–7. For these respondents, instability—financial, political, and interpersonal—has become a defining feature of daily life.

Young Americans see AI as more likely to take something away than to create something new. A majority (59%) see AI as a threat to their job prospects, more than immigration (31%) or outsourcing of jobs to other countries (48%).

Nearly 45% say AI will reduce opportunities, while only 14% expect gains. Another 17% foresee no change and 23% are unsure—and this holds across education levels and gender.

In addition, young people fear AI will undermine the meaning of work. About 41% say AI will make work less meaningful, compared to 14% who say it will make work more meaningful and 19% who think it will make no difference; a quarter (25%) say they are unsure.

In my conversations this year with CFOs and industry experts, many have said that the goal of using AI is to remove the mundane and manual aspects of work in order to create more meaningful, thought‑provoking opportunities. However, that message does not yet seem to be resonating with younger employees.

There is a lot of public discussion and widespread fear that AI will mostly take away jobs, but research by McKinsey Global Institute released last week offers a different perspective. According to the report, AI could, in theory, automate about 57% of U.S. work hours, but that figure measures the technical potential in tasks, not the inevitable loss of jobs, as Fortune reported.

Instead of mass replacement, McKinsey researchers argue the future of work will be defined by partnerships among people, agents, and robots—all powered by AI, but dependent on human guidance and organizational redesign. The primary reason AI will not result in half the workforce being immediately sidelined is the enduring relevance of human skills.

The Harvard poll also found young people have greater trust in AI for school and work tasks (52% overall, 63% among college students) and for learning or tutoring (48% overall, 63% among college students). But trust drops sharply for personal matters.

Young employees are considered AI natives. However, it is important to recognize that they have not experienced as many major technology shifts as more seasoned employees—like the dawn of the internet. It’s not to say that AI won’t change the workforce, but there’s still room and need for humans. It’s up to leaders to clearly communicate how AI will change roles, which tasks it will automate, and also provide ongoing training and guidance on how employees can still grow their careers in an AI-powered workplace.

Have a good weekend. See you on Monday.

SherylEstrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com

Leaderboard

Fortune 500 Power Moves

Amanda Brimmer was appointed CFO of leasing advisory and head of corporatedevelopment at JLL (No. 188), a global commercial real estate and investment management company. Reporting to JLL CFO Kelly Howe, Brimmer will partner with business leaders globally to drive financial growth and performance. Brimmer brings more than two decades of experience from Boston Consulting Group, where she most recently served as managing director and senior partner.

Galagher Jeff was appointed EVP and CFO of ARKO Corp. (No. 488), one of the largest convenience store operators and fuel wholesalers in the U.S., effective Dec. 1. Jeff most recently served as EVP and CFO for Murphy USA, Inc. Before that, he spent nearly 15 years in senior and executive finance roles with retailers, including Dollar Tree Stores, Inc., Advance Auto Parts, Inc. and Walmart Stores, Inc., in addition to a decade-long career in finance and strategy consulting at organizations including KPMG and Ernst & Young.

Every Friday morning, the weekly Fortune 500 Power Moves column tracks Fortune 500 company C-suite shifts—see the most recent edition.

More notable moves this week:

Barbara Larson, CFO of SentinelOne, a cybersecurity company, will transition from her role to pursue an opportunity outside of the cybersecurity industry. Larson will continue to serve in her role through mid-January 2026. Upon her departure, Barry Padgett, chief growth officer, will serve as interim CFO. Barry has more than 25 years of experience in operational leadership at enterprise software companies, including SAP and Stripe. SentinelOne has initiated a search for its next CFO.

Jessica Ross was appointed CFO of GitLab Inc. (Nasdaq: GTLB), a DevSecOps platform, effective Jan. 15. Ross joins the company from Frontdoor, where she served as CFO. She has more than 25 years of experience in finance, accounting, and operational leadership at companies like Salesforce and Stitch Fix, and spent 12 years in public accounting at Arthur Andersen and Deloitte.

Michele Allen was appointed CFO of Jersey Mike’s Subs, a franchisor of fast-casual sandwich shops, effective Dec. 1. Allen succeeds Walter Tombs, who is retiring from Jersey Mike’s in January after 26 years with the company. Allen brings more than 25 years of financial leadership experience. Most recently, she served as CFO and head of strategy at Wyndham Hotels & Resorts. Allen began her career with Deloitte as an auditor.

Nick Tressler was appointed CFO of Vistagen (Nasdaq: VTGN), a late clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company, effective Dec. 1. Tressler brings over 20 years of financial leadership experience. Most recently, he served as CFO of DYNEX Technologies, and before that, he was the CFO at American Gene Technologies, International, and Senseonics Holdings, Inc. Tressler has also held senior finance roles at several biopharmaceutical companies.

Mike Lenihan was appointed CFO of Texas Roadhouse, Inc. (NasdaqGS: TXRH), a restaurant company, effective Dec. 3. Keith Humpich, who served as interim CFO, was appointed chief accounting and financial services officer of the company. Lenihan has nearly 30 years of finance experience, including the past 22 years in the restaurant industry. Most recently, he served as the CFO at CKE Restaurants, Inc.

Big Deal

The ADP National Employment Report, released on Dec. 3, indicated that private-sector employment declined by 32,000 jobs in November. ADP found that job creation has been flat during the second half of 2025, while pay growth has continued its downward trend. In November, hiring was particularly weak in manufacturing, professional and business services, information, and construction.

“Hiring has been choppy of late as employers weather cautious consumers and an uncertain macroeconomic environment,” said Nela Richardson, chief economist at ADP, in a statement. “And while November’s slowdown was broad-based, it was led by a pullback among small businesses.”

ADP’s report is an independent measure of labor market conditions based on anonymized weekly payroll data from more than 26 million private-sector employees in the U.S. The next major U.S. Jobs Report (Employment Situation) for November is scheduled for release on Dec. 16 by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Going deeper

Here are four Fortune weekend reads:

Overheard

“The Fed no more ‘determines’ interest rates than a meteorologist determines the weather.”

—Alexander William Salter states in a Fortune opinion piece. Salter is a senior fellow with the Independent Institute and an economics professor in the Rawls College of Business at Texas Tech University. He writes: “The Fed doesn’t set interest rates. As powerful as America’s central bank is, it’s still just one player in a globe-spanning ocean of financial markets. Instead, the Fed sets targets for short-term interest rates. Those target rates indicate the Fed’s general monetary policy stance, but they are not the substance of monetary policy.”

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Business

Four key questions about OpenAI vs Google—the high-stakes tech matchup of 2026

Published

1 hour ago

December 5, 2025

Jace Porter

Hello, Tech Editor Alexei Oreskovic, pitching in for Allie. We’ve been enjoying some crisp blue-sky days here in San Francisco in true December fashion. For the folks at OpenAI however, the days have been red — Code Red.

In case you haven’t been following, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Monday declared a “Code Red” alert in a memo to employees, according to the Information and the Wall Street Journal. The alert, the highest level on OpenAI’s three-point scale, is essentially an all-hands-on-deck call to mobilize and defend against an imminent threat. That threat is Google and its latest version of the Gemini AI model, which competes with OpenAI’s GPT family of models, particularly its flagship ChatGPT product.

It’s a remarkable turn of events, almost exactly three years to the day that OpenAI released ChatGPT and put Google and the rest of the tech industry on the back foot. Now Google is on the ascent, hoping to turn OpenAI into MySpace. Of course, with its $500 billion valuation, OpenAI and its investors are not about to surrender.

So, as the two AI superpowers roll up their sleeves for what’s sure to be a 2026 slugfest, we thought it would be interesting to tap into the wisdom of Term Sheet readers and ask for your perspectives on some of the key questions of this critical moment in tech history. Send your thoughts directly to me or to Allie G.

How can a company like OpenAI turn a first-mover advantage into a sustainable and long-lasting business that doesn’t get bulldozed by giants with more resources and capital?

Is there a lesson—good or bad—from a first mover of the past (e.g. Netscape vs Microsoft; Blackberry vs iPhone) that OpenAI should heed?

What is the Google Achilles heel that OpenAI should exploit?

What is the single most important thing that OpenAI needs to execute on right now – and what is the best metric to measure its success?

And of course, what other important parts of this story should we be thinking about?

Fire away!

Alexei Oreskovic
X:@lexnfx
Email:alexei.oreskovic@fortune.com
Submit a deal for the Term Sheet newsletter here.

Joey Abrams curated the deals section of today’s newsletter.Subscribe here.

Venture Deals

– 7AI, a Boston-based agentic cybersecurity platform, raised $130 million in Series A funding. Index Ventures led the round and was joined by Blackstone Innovations Investments, as well as existing seed investors Greylock, CRV, and Spark.

– Fact Base, a Tokyo-based manufacturing SaaS startup and maker of drawing management system ZUMEN, raised $28.5 million in Series C funding from Insight Partners.

– imper.ai, a New York City-based startup that prevents AI and cyber impersonation, emerged from stealth after raising $28 million in funding. Redpoint Ventures and Battery Ventures led the investment round and were joined by Maple VC, Vessy VC, and Cerca Partners.

– pH7 Technologies, a Vancouver, British Columbia-based metal extraction company, raised $25.6 million in initial Series B funding. Fine Structure Ventures led the round with strategic investment from BHP Ventures and was joined Energy & Environment Investment, Siteground, Gaingels Fund, and Calm Ventures, along with existing investors including TDK Ventures, Pangaea Ventures, Rhapsody Venture Partners, and BASF Venture Capital.

– Pine AI, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup that specializes in agentic AI for customer service applications, raised $25 million in Series A funding. Investors included Fortwest Capital.

– Lumia, an agentic AI security and governance platform, raised $18 million in seed funding. Team8 led the round and was joined by New Era.

– Multifactor, a San Francisco-based agentic AI security platform, raised $15 million in seed funding. Nexus Venture Partners led the round and was joined by Y Combinator, Taurus Ventures, Honeystone Ventures, Flex Capital, Pioneer Fund, Ritual Capital, and Liquid2 Ventures.

– Laigo Bio, a Utrecht, Netherlands-based biotech company specializing in novel membrane protein degradation, raised €11.5 million ($13.4 million) in seed funding. Kurma Partners and Curie Capital co-led the round and were joined by Argobio Studio, Angelini Ventures, Eurazeo, the Oncode Bridge Fund, ROM Utrecht Region, and Cancer Research Horizons.

– Helmet Security, a Washington, D.C.-based agentic AI communication security startup, emerged from stealth after raising $9 million from SYN Ventures and WhiteRabbit Ventures.

– Addis Energy, a Somerville, Mass.-based ammonia production technology developer, raised $8.3 million in seed funding. At One Ventures led the round and was joined by existing investors Engine Ventures and Pillar VC.

– Alinia AI, a Barcelona, Spain- and New York City-based startup that builds compliance tools for AI systems, raised $7.5 million in seed funding. Mouro Capital led the round and was joined by Speedinvest, Raise Ventures, and Precursor.

– BuiltAI, a London, U.K.-based financial modeling platform for commercial real estate investment, raised $6 million in seed funding. Work-Bench led the round and was joined by Lerer Hippeau, Timber Grove Ventures, Emerald Pine, and angel investors.

– Curvestone AI, a London, U.K.-based platform that reduces compound errors in automated workflows, raised $4 million seed funding. MTech Capital led the round and was joined by Boost Capital Partners, D2 Fund, and Portfolio Ventures.

– Govstream.ai, a Seattle-based startup building AI-native permitting tools for local governments, raised $3.6 million in seed funding. 47th Street Partners led the round and was joined by Nellore Capital, Ascend, Kevin Merritt, and Andreas Huber.

Private Equity

– Ares Management Corporation recapitalized MGT, a Tampa-based national technology and advisory solutions company serving state and local education institutions and governments, with a $350 million investment that values MGT at $1.25 billion. Existing investors include the Vistria Group, JPMorgan, and WhiteHorse Capital.

– TRP Infrastructure Services, an Arlington Capital Partners portfolio company, completed its acquisition of Corpus Christi, Texas-based Highway Barricades & Services, a provider of pavement marking and traffic control services. Financial terms were not disclosed.

– The Care Team, a Revelstoke Capital Partners portfolio company, acquired select hospice and palliative care operations from Traditions Health, a Tennessee-based hospice, palliative, and home health provider with operations in 16 states. Financial terms were not disclosed.

– Inovara Group, an Ambienta portfolio company, acquired Guildford, U.K.-based IBL Lighting Limited, an LED engine design and architectural lighting provider. Financial terms were not disclosed.