Eric Schmidt will step down as the executive chairman of Alphabet’s board of directors, the company announced on Thursday.

Schmidt will remain on Alphabet’s board and serve as a technical adviser to the company, whose holdings include Google, YouTube, Nest and Waymo.

“Larry, Sergey, Sundar and I all believe that the time is right in Alphabet’s evolution for this transition,” Schmidt said in a statement, referencing Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin as well as Google’s current chief executive, Sundar Pichai. “In recent years, I’ve been spending a lot of my time on science and technology issues, and philanthropy, and I plan to expand that work.”

The company said that it plans to appoint a non-executive chairman to replace Schmidt.

The 62-year-old has played an integral role in Google’s rise from a graduate student research project to a multinational tech conglomerate. Schmidt had previously worked at Sun Microsystems and Novell before being hired by Page and Brin in 2001 to run the company.

Schmidt served as chief executive of Google until 2011, when he stepped down but maintained his position as chairman of the board of directors. A 2015 corporate restructuring saw Schmidt become the chairman of Alphabet, a new holding company for Google and several other subsidiaries.

