The former CTO is a 10-year veteran at Twitter and is responsible for accelerating the company’s use of AI.<\/b>
\nTwitter co-founder and outgoing CEO Jack Dorsey threw in the towel earlier this week, announcing he\u2019d immediately be succeeded by former Twitter CTO Parag Agrawal. Dorsey was scant on details explaining his departure, noting only that he believed it was time for the company to move beyond its founders. News of Dorsey\u2019s exit was leaked by CNBC before being confirmed by the company soon after. Despite the high-profile departure, relatively little is known about the 10-year Twitter veteran taking over the reins. Here are seven things we do know so far about Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal. The new CEO received an undergraduate degree in computer science and engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. Agrawal then completed a PhD in philosophy and computer science at Stanford University between 2005-2012, according to his LinkedIn profile. In 2006, Agrawal joined Microsoft for a brief four-month research role before moving on to research positions at Yahoo and AT&T, according to LinkedIn. Agrawal first arrived at Twitter in 2011, just months after Dorsey returned as CEO following his removal from the top position in 2008. When Agrawal started at Twitter, he reportedly worked on a project related to increasing the relevance of users\u2019 tweets on their timelines and audience growth. He then received the title \u201cdistinguished engineer\u201d for his impact on audience growth, according to Forbes. Agrawal was named CTO in 2018, nearly seven years after joining the company. As CTO, Agrawal focused on \u201cscaling a cohesive machine learning and AI approach,\u201d across Twitter\u2019s consumer and infrastructure team, a spokesperson previously told CNBC. Agrawal spoke in some detail on Twitter\u2019s efforts to use AI to detect bot accounts and label potentially harmful content with the Atlantic\u2019s CEO, Nicholas Thompson. Since 2019, Argawal has been involved in Bluesky, a project funded by Twitter aimed at creating a decentralized social media standard. Though details around Bluesky remain scarce, the project named its first leader, Jay Graber, earlier this year. Dorsey has previously described Bluesky as the \u201cstandard for the public conversation layer of the internet.\u201d In his resignation letter, Dorsey said Agrawal had been unanimously appointed by Twitter\u2019s board and had been his personal pick to lead the position for some time. \u201cMy trust in him [Agrawal] as our CEO is bone deep,\u201d Dorsey said. Former Twitter employee speaking with the Wall Street Journal similarly described Agrawal as a \u201cclose friend\u201d to Dorsey. Just hours after being named CEO, some critics pointed to Agrawal\u2019s previous statement on Twitter\u2019s response to handling misinformation as evidence of censorship against conservatives. Specifically, critics pointed to a 2020 interview Agrawal gave to the MIT Technology Review in which he said Twitter\u2019s \u201crole is not to be bound by the First Amendment, but our role is to serve a healthy public conversation.\u201d<\/p>\n