Apple Brings On Google Shopping VP to Lead AI Marketing Push

Apple has hired former Google VP Lilian Rincon as its vice president of product marketing for artificial intelligence, reports Axios. Before joining Apple, Rincon was vice president of product for Google Shopping.

At Apple, Rincon will be in charge of product marketing and product management for all of Apple's AI platforms, reporting to Apple marketing chief Greg Joswiak.

Rincon led the global product organization that handled Google's consumer-facing shopping experiences, and before that, she was a director of product management in the Google Shopping division, and she worked on Google Assistant. Rincon first joined Google in 2017, and she also previously worked at Microsoft and Skype.

Apple's AI marketing efforts come at a critical time as it prepares to roll out the updated chatbot version of Siri in iOS 27, and Rincon has a lot of work ahead. Apple is seen as being far behind competitors when it comes to AI development, both because of its failure to deploy Apple Intelligence Siri features on time and because iOS, macOS, and iPadOS offer far fewer AI features compared to Android and Windows.

With ‌iOS 27‌, Apple is overhauling ‌Siri‌. We'll get the smarter ‌Siri‌ Apple first introduced at the June 2024 WWDC keynote, plus Apple is planning for a full chatbot version of ‌Siri‌ that will compete with chatbots like Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT.

We'll see our first glimpse of the new AI features Apple has planned at the 2026 Worldwide Developers Conference, which begins on Monday, June 8.