Google has appointed Koray Kavukcuoglu as its first Chief AI Architect to lead AI product development. He currently serves as Chief Technology Officer at Google DeepMind and will now report directly to CEO Sundar Pichai. Kavukcuoglu began his career as an aerospace engineer and holds a PhD in computer science. He joined DeepMind in 2012. He worked under AI pioneer Yann LeCun and has helped drive many of DeepMind’s biggest breakthroughs. Now, Google wants him to focus on turning those breakthroughs into real-world products.
In an internal memo, Pichai said Kavukcuoglu will speed up the integration of Google’s most advanced AI models into its products. Kavukcuoglu will keep his role as CTO while taking on this new responsibility and will move from London to Google’s headquarters in Mountain View.
This change is part of Google’s plan to move faster in the AI race. With strong competition from ChatGPT and other AI tools, Google has already merged DeepMind with Google Brain and reshuffled leadership teams. Earlier this year, the company moved Josh Woodward, co-creator of NotebookLM, to lead the Gemini AI project.
Although Google’s Gemini models are among the best in the industry, the company hasn’t released products fast enough. Kavukcuoglu’s new role aims to fix that by aligning product teams more closely with AI research and anticipating what users will need next.
Google is also working on projects like Project Mariner. The project controls a web browser, and Astra, which helps AI understand the physical world. The company hopes to turn these innovations into useful tools for everyday users. At the same time, Google Search, its biggest source of revenue, faces pressure from new AI-powered search tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity.
DeepMind plays a key role in Google’s AI strategy. With Kavukcuoglu, Google plans to go beyond software and bring AI into smart home devices, robotics, and wearables. As AI advances faster than ever, Google wants to lead the next wave of innovation.
