Apple Taps Google Veteran Lilian Rincon to Market AI Push as Siri Overhaul Nears

Apple has hired longtime Google executive Lilian Rincon to lead marketing for its artificial intelligence products, a high-profile move that underscores how urgently the iPhone maker is trying to rehabilitate Siri and catch up in consumer AI.

Rincon will serve as vice president of product marketing for AI and report to Greg Joswiak, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, the company confirmed in comments published Friday. Her appointment comes as Apple works toward a long-promised but delayed overhaul of Siri that it is expected to detail at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June.

The hire is one of the clearest signals yet that Apple is attempting a broad reset of its AI strategy after a halting rollout of its Apple Intelligence features and mounting criticism that Siri lags rival assistants. It follows the planned retirement of John Giannandrea, Apple’s longtime head of machine learning and AI strategy, and the elevation of former Google and Microsoft leader Amar Subramanya to vice president of AI, where he now oversees the company’s core AI research and models.

Rincon’s mandate sits on the other side of that equation: deciding how those capabilities are packaged, positioned and explained to more than a billion users across the iPhone, iPad, Mac and other Apple devices.

Google’s assistant architect crosses over

Rincon arrives at Apple with more than a decade of front-line experience building and marketing consumer-facing AI products.

At Google, she most recently served as vice president of product for Google Shopping, overseeing the search company’s push into AI-driven commerce. Under her leadership, Google tied its Shopping experiences more tightly to its Gemini large language models, testing conversational search tools that help users discover products and “agentic” features that can track prices and complete purchases with user approval.

Before that, she spent years on Google Assistant, where a company profile in 2020 described her as running “the team that creates new features and functions” for the voice assistant. At that point, Google said Assistant was used by more than 500 million people each month across phones, smart speakers, cars and other devices.

Rincon previously worked at Microsoft and its then-subsidiary Skype, including on Skype Translator and early integrations between Skype and the Cortana voice assistant. Her background is in computer science; she has described herself publicly as half Chinese and half Spanish, born in Venezuela and raised in Canada after her family immigrated when she was 9. She has been featured on lists of influential Latinas in technology.

At Apple, Rincon is expected to oversee how AI features are defined and marketed across the company’s software platforms and services, with a particular focus on Siri and Apple Intelligence.

A delayed makeover for Siri

Siri, introduced in 2011 on the iPhone 4S, was one of the first voice-controlled assistants on a mainstream smartphone. Over the decade that followed, it was increasingly seen by analysts and users as less capable and less flexible than Google Assistant and Amazon’s Alexa, struggling with complex queries and more natural back-and-forth conversations.

In June 2024, Apple attempted to answer those criticisms by unveiling Apple Intelligence, a suite of generative AI features for iOS 18, iPadOS 18 and macOS Sequoia. The company promised a more conversational Siri that could better understand context, control apps more deeply and tap both on-device models and cloud-based processing through what it called Private Cloud Compute.

Some of those capabilities rolled out later that year, but in limited form. Apple restricted Apple Intelligence initially to U.S. English and flagged many of the most ambitious Siri upgrades as “coming later.” Software updates in early 2025 arrived without the fully revamped, more personal version of Siri the company had previewed, and Apple acknowledged in interviews at the time that key features would take longer than expected and be phased in over the following year.

News reports since have routinely referred to a “delayed overhaul” of Siri, and expectations have shifted to 2026, when Apple is widely expected to give a fuller accounting of its assistant roadmap.

Leaning on rivals for AI muscle

The internal delays have played out as competitors moved aggressively to weave large language models into their products. Microsoft has built OpenAI’s GPT-based models into its Windows operating system and Office productivity software under the Copilot brand. Google has pushed its Gemini models into search, Android and Workspace tools. Meta has released its Llama models and assistants across Instagram, WhatsApp and other apps.

Apple, by contrast, has emphasized privacy and on-device processing, arguing that many tasks can and should be handled locally on its own chips. At the same time, the company has quietly turned to outside partners to bolster its AI offerings while it develops its own large-scale systems.

In 2024, Apple announced that Siri would be able to hand off certain complex queries to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, with explicit user permission, framing the integration as an optional extension rather than a replacement. In January 2026, Apple and Google disclosed a multiyear agreement that allows Apple to run Google’s Gemini models from Apple devices and its own servers to power parts of Apple Intelligence and accelerate Siri’s upgrade.

In a joint announcement at the time, the companies said the deal would “bring powerful generative models to Apple users” while respecting Apple’s privacy principles. News service accounts described the arrangement as Apple relying on Google to help “smarten up Siri and bring other AI features to the iPhone.”

Apple has said it continues to develop proprietary models that will run both on devices and in its data centers, but it has not disclosed complete technical details.

Leadership shuffle around AI

Rincon’s appointment comes amid broader turnover in Apple’s AI ranks.

Giannandrea, the former Google search and AI executive hired by Apple in 2018 to unify its machine learning efforts and improve Siri, is scheduled to retire this spring after what some coverage has characterized as a difficult tenure marked by slower-than-expected progress in generative AI. Apple has said he will remain as an adviser during a transition period.

In late 2025, Apple named Amar Subramanya as vice president of AI. Subramanya, an Indian-born researcher with a doctorate in machine learning, previously spent more than a decade at Google and later led AI initiatives at Microsoft. At Apple he is responsible for the company’s core AI research, foundation models and safety evaluation, reporting to software chief Craig Federighi.

Together, Subramanya and Rincon now represent the two main poles of Apple’s AI strategy: the engineering and research side, and the product and marketing side that determines what users actually see.

High stakes for Apple’s ecosystem

The stakes for getting that strategy right are significant. As AI assistants evolve from simple voice interfaces into systems that can understand context, carry out multi-step tasks and interact with third-party apps, they risk becoming the primary way many people navigate their devices.

That shift could deepen the already strong pull of major ecosystems if a single assistant mediates shopping, media consumption, productivity and communication through one interface. Regulators in the United States and European Union have scrutinized large technology platforms for self-preferencing and gatekeeping behavior in app stores and search; a more powerful Siri that routes users to services and apps could draw similar attention.

Privacy advocates are also watching how companies handle the vast amounts of data needed to train and run large language models. Apple has pledged that its Private Cloud Compute architecture will minimize data retention and limit who can access user information. The company has said it will explain when tasks are handled on-device and when they are sent to its servers or, in limited cases, to partner models, but the details of those disclosures will be closely examined when Apple Intelligence expands beyond early adopters.

Rincon is expected to play a central role in that messaging. Her team will be responsible not only for promoting new AI features but also for setting expectations about their limitations, safeguards and trade-offs.

Apple has not said when Rincon will appear publicly in her new role. The company’s developer conference, which begins June 8 in Cupertino, California, is likely to be the first major test of how it now talks about Siri and AI — and whether a veteran of Google Assistant can help convince users that Apple’s once-pioneering voice assistant is ready for a second act.