Josh Woodward isn’t a household name in Silicon Valley. Inside Google, he’s become hard to miss.
The 42-year-old Oklahoma native started at Google as a product marketing intern in 2009. Now he’s running two of the company’s most visible bets: the Gemini app, which he took over in April 2025, and Google Labs, the skunkworks-style unit behind many of Google’s experimental AI products.
With consumers increasingly testing AI chatbots for everything from search to shopping, Woodward sits at the pointy end of Google’s fight to keep users in its ecosystem—without moving so fast that it compromises trust.
Clay Bavor, the former co-lead of Google Labs, told CNBC that Woodward’s ability to move quickly and cut through internal barriers has put him “right at the center of the most important work at Google.”
Google’s Gemini moment
Google has been racing to match the momentum created by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which launched in late 2022 and helped kick off the generative AI boom. The stakes have only risen as AI tools expand beyond text into images, video, and commerce—areas where Google has a lot to protect.
When Woodward took over the Gemini app this spring, the company’s AI posture was under pressure, and the job came with a clear mandate: ship faster, iterate in public, and keep the experience good enough that people don’t drift away.
Demis Hassabis, co-founder of Google DeepMind, framed Woodward’s remit as driving the “next evolution” of the app, according to Semafor.
“Nano Banana” turns into a stress test
A turning point arrived in late August with a Gemini image-generation feature Google introduced on August 26, 2025: an image tool nicknamed “nano-banana.” Users quickly latched onto it for playful, viral use cases—most notably combining photos to create stylized, personalized figurines.
The surge was so intense that Google had to impose temporary usage limits to keep systems stable, according to CNBC. At a November all-hands meeting, Google’s head of AI infrastructure Amin Vahdat joked that the company’s custom AI chips, called TPUs, “almost melted,” CNBC reported, citing internal audio.
Google also says the feature has fueled massive creation volume—more than 5 billion images generated to date in the Gemini app.
By mid-September, Gemini briefly climbed to the No. 1 spot on Apple’s U.S. App Store, edging out ChatGPT. Google has since started rolling the image capability into other products, including Google Lens and Circle to Search.
Big numbers, bigger expectations
Google is pouring money into AI infrastructure ahead of what it expects will be a long demand curve. On its October earnings call, the company said 2025 capital expenditures would land around $91 billion to $93 billion, higher than its earlier forecast.
Usage metrics are swelling, too. Google said in October that the Gemini app has 650 million+ monthly active users, up sharply from earlier in the year. (Court filings reported the app had around 350 million monthly active users in March.)
Google’s AI Overviews—its generative summaries that appear in Search—now reach about 2 billion monthly users, the company says. OpenAI, meanwhile, has said ChatGPT is now serving hundreds of millions of users per week.
In mid-November, Google introduced Gemini 3, its latest flagship model, helping drive a new wave of developer and investor excitement.
“I’ve never had more fun than right now,” Woodward told CNBC’s Deirdre Bosa after the release. “It’s partly the pace… it’s partly the abilities these models give to people who can imagine use cases and products.”
Move fast, don’t break trust
Woodward’s job isn’t just speed. It’s judgment.
AI is flooding the internet with synthetic images, videos, and copy—some useful, some spammy, and some actively misleading. That creates a constant tension: ship aggressively to compete with OpenAI and Anthropic, but avoid pushing products that make harm easier.
Woodward has spoken publicly about that balance. In a March podcast conversation with Sequoia partners—before taking over the Gemini app—he pointed to AI video as a flashpoint, especially after OpenAI’s Sora preview in late 2024.
“These moments… change often for generations,” he said. “And they can change for good or bad.”
That concern became more concrete with Nano Banana Pro, released on November 20, 2025. Some critics argued the tool could reproduce harmful stereotypes—The Guardian, for example, highlighted outputs that echoed “white savior” tropes in response to prompts about humanitarian aid in Africa.
The Labs playbook: let teams cook
Colleagues describe Woodward as friendly and disarming—someone who doesn’t need bluster to apply pressure. He joined Google Labs in 2022, and Bavor has said he was his first choice to help lead the effort.
One of Labs’ earliest breakout hits began as “Project Tailwind,” built in part through Google’s 20% time culture. The project eventually became NotebookLM, the tool that lets users upload articles, PDFs, and other sources to generate summaries, ask questions, and get citations.
To help the product find its voice, Woodward recruited author Steven Johnson as a part-time “visiting scholar” in 2022. Johnson went full time in May 2023 and immediately got pulled into a sprint: an I/O demo built on an idea Woodward wanted on stage fast.
NotebookLM launched in July 2023 and has since expanded into more audio- and media-oriented features—while Woodward has kept pushing for rapid iteration and direct feedback loops, including engaging users on X and Reddit.
Demos, pressure, and 2026
By late 2025, Woodward had become one of Google’s go-to demo leaders, showing off a rapid sequence of products at internal all-hands meetings—tools like Project Mariner (multitasking in Chrome), Veo (video generation), and Whisk (experimental creative tooling), alongside Gemini features.
He also helped spin up “Demo Slam,” an internal show-and-tell timed around I/O, giving employees a stage to ship quickly and share wins.
Heading into 2026, that “ship it” rhythm is now part of the company’s broader story. At a recent all-hands, CEO Sundar Pichai praised the pace: “The momentum has been incredible to see… We’ve been shipping at a pretty fast pace across the company.”
For Woodward, the assignment is straightforward to describe and hard to execute: keep Gemini moving fast enough to win, while keeping Google’s reputation intact in an era where AI can scale mistakes just as easily as breakthroughs.