Google names first chief AI architect to bridge research-product gap

Google has appointed Koray Kavukcuoglu, Google DeepMind’s chief technology officer, as its first chief AI architect, a new senior vice president role reporting directly to CEO Sundar Pichai. The position reflects Google’s push to better translate its leading AI research capabilities into successful consumer products, as the company faces mounting pressure to compete with rivals like OpenAI while maintaining its dominant search business.

What you should know: Kavukcuoglu will oversee how Google integrates its Gemini AI models across the company’s product portfolio while maintaining his current CTO role at DeepMind.

• The former aerospace engineer joined DeepMind in 2012 as a researcher and helped guide the company’s major AI breakthroughs under CEO Demis Hassabis.
• He will relocate from London to Mountain View to coordinate directly with Google’s product teams.
• Pichai said Kavukcuoglu will “accelerate how we bring our world-leading models into our products, with the goal of more seamless integration, faster iteration, and greater efficiency.”

The big picture: Google is restructuring to address a fundamental challenge in the AI era—its Gemini models are widely regarded as the best in the industry, but the company struggles to convert that technical superiority into market-leading products.

• The pace of AI model innovation has outpaced product development, creating a gap between Google’s research capabilities and consumer-facing applications.
• Recent organizational changes include merging DeepMind with Google Brain and installing Hassabis to lead AI efforts company-wide.
• In April, Google moved Josh Woodward from Google Labs to lead Gemini development, following his success creating NotebookLM, which converts text into podcast-like audio shows.

Why this matters: Google faces an existential threat as competitors like ChatGPT and Perplexity begin replacing traditional search for some users, potentially undermining the core business that generates most of the company’s revenue.

• The company recently offered buyouts to employees in its Search organization, signaling major changes to its foundational product.
• Google’s own researchers pioneered the AI architecture that powers ChatGPT, but competitors capitalized on the breakthrough while Google hesitated to deploy it widely.
• New Gemini capabilities like Project Mariner, which autonomously controls web browsers, and Astra, which understands the physical world, represent promising foundations for future products.

Competitive landscape: Google’s challenge lies in innovating without disrupting its massive existing user base, particularly the billions who rely on traditional blue-link search results.

• The company cannot simply “flip a switch and drastically change” products overnight due to user dependency and expectations.
• Antitrust scrutiny makes acquiring innovative competitors like YouTube was in 2006 extremely difficult today.
• Hardware products including Waymo autonomous vehicles, consumer robotics, and AI-powered glasses through partnerships like Xreal offer new growth opportunities beyond search.

What they’re saying: Pichai emphasized the urgency of Google’s transformation in his internal memo.

• “We’re entering a new phase of the AI platform shift. It will require us to also shift into a new gear as a company to ensure our products are evolving just as quickly as our models,” he wrote.
• In a recent interview, Hassabis said achieving artificial general intelligence “will require massive computational scale and key breakthroughs—advances DeepMind is actively pursuing in its work.”