Google’s chief executive Sundar Pichai told Stanford his father spent a year’s salary on his ticket, and skipped AI

The most valuable story Sundar Pichai owns is not about search, Chrome or Gemini. It is about a plane ticket his father could barely afford, and Google’s chief executive has now told it to a second graduating class, this time in a stadium where some graduates walked out as he took the stage.

The line is travelling again this week, packaged as a rags-to-riches confession. Read as corporate communication, it is something more deliberate: the head of one of the most scrutinised companies in technology, facing the class most anxious about what his industry is building, chose to talk about his family and kept artificial intelligence almost entirely out of the room.

What Pichai told Stanford’s graduates

“My father spent the equivalent of a year’s salary to buy my ticket,” Pichai said in his commencement address at Stanford, according to the transcript Google published. “It was my first time on a plane.” He described a childhood in Chennai where the…