(Bloomberg) — Alphabet Inc. named Eli Lilly & Co. executive Anat Ashkenazi as its new chief financial officer, replacing Ruth Porat, who announced last year that she planned to step down.
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Ashkenazi, 51, served as CFO and executive vice president at the drugmaker, where he worked for more than 23 years, Alphabet said in a filing released Wednesday morning. His new role takes effect on July 31.
Porat, 66, who took over as Google’s CFO in 2015, oversaw the search giant’s transition to its current Alphabet structure and took on a new role at the company as president and chief investment officer. She ushered in a period of greater fiscal discipline at Alphabet, oversaw the growth of its cloud computing unit, which became profitable last year, and YouTube, now the most popular streaming service on television.
Last year, she oversaw Alphabet’s investments in its Other Bets division, an eclectic collection of nascent businesses such as life sciences unit Verily and autonomous driving startup Waymo that the company is working to boost profitability.
Ashkenazi, who has served as Eli Lilly’s CFO since 2021, oversaw the financial heads of the commercial businesses, as well as those of research and development, manufacturing and quality, and also led the corporate strategic planning team and business transformation office. During Ashkenazi’s time as CFO, Lilly launched Mounjaro and Zepbound, diabetes and weight-loss drugs that made it the most valuable pharmaceutical company in the world.
Its move to Alphabet is “very hard to question despite the pharmaceutical (and consumer) monster that Lilly has become,” said Mizuho Group analyst Jared Holz. The “Alphabet CFO job is probably one of the best in corporate America.”
Alphabet shares rose less than 1% in Wednesday’s premarket trading in New York.
Ashkenazi takes on the role at a crucial time for Alphabet. The company, valued at more than $2 billion, refocused its teams and focused on generative artificial intelligence, which can answer questions in a conversational tone based on people’s questions. But the computing power and costs associated with the technology are enormous. Ashkenazi will need to manage Alphabet’s books as the company continues to invest heavily in data centers and compete with other tech giants for talented employees.
Ashkenazi’s experience in healthcare could also help boost Alphabet’s reputation in a sector with vast potential in generative AI, said Mandeep Singh, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. She “could help expand Alphabet’s addressable market and help catalyze some of its advances,” Singh said, “given its experience and the availability of data in healthcare as a generative application of AI.”
Alphabet has been trying to revolutionize healthcare for years, with varying success. Recently, the company announced a series of initiatives to deploy its AI models in the healthcare industry, including a tool that will help Fitbit users gain insights from their wearable devices. Last year, Google launched Med-PaLM, an AI model that expertly answered medical questions. The announcements followed a broad shift in the company’s strategy in 2021, in which it incorporated healthcare research and other features into its core products, such as search and YouTube, rather than launching new commercial services.
But the efforts have caused some of its ambitious health care goals, embodied by Alphabet units like Verily and life extension company Calico, to falter somewhat. Ashkenazi can play a vital role in reprioritizing efforts that once made headlines, such as the motion stabilizing spoon to help people with movement disorders or the mosquito modification project that aimed to curb the spread of malaria.
Alphabet shares are up about 40% over the past year and the company reported quarterly profit that rose by more than half in the first quarter. It also announced its first cash dividend, a welcome sign to investors after months of heavy spending on AI.
(Updates with analyst comments and details)
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