- Google marketing VP Adrienne Lofton spoke with Business Insider about the market for AI devices.
- Lofton says that some AI devices are advancing faster than consumer demand.
- She shared how her team internally uses Google's AI for their devices marketing strategy.
Before joining Google, Adrienne Lofton, Google's global vice president of marketing for Pixel and other devices, confessed to being a "lifelong" iPhone user.
Now, while the search giant's Pixel phone has a long way to catch up to Apple's iPhone, Lofton says it may stand a chance of becoming the AI device.
In October, I interviewed Lofton, who was really understanding when I reached for my iPhone to take notes during our chat. She talked about how her team uses Google AI products to shave months off the company's marketing strategy and how she thinks about positioning AI capabilities to consumers.
We also talked about new products like the Friend pendant, how ready the market is for AI, and what convinced her to make the switch to Pixel.
This Q&A has been edited for clarity and length.
Business Insider: Can you speak to Google's marketing considerations for presenting its AI tools against the backdrop of organizations questioning the costs and productivity gains from using AI?
Adrienne Lofton: On the consumer side, one of the things we talk about from a Gemini perspective is the fact that it is easily integrated into our Google Suite, which we think is our biggest differentiator.
We always lean into the ability to supercharge productivity as well as creativity, and being able to do that 10-fold if you compare it to the competitors in the marketplace, because we have an integrated stack.
So, you can use Gemini in Gmail, in Photos, and all the apps you already know and love, and the other piece that we talk a lot about for the consumer is that Gemini is just a more intuitive product that's easier to use.
Every competitor right now is screaming generative AI from the mountaintops. If you look at consumer data, not enterprise data, 50% of consumers are adopting, while 50% remain quite skeptical.
What we continue to push on is making sure there's a clear consumer benefit that you can see and trial exactly what it can do for you.
Given all the innovation happening within Pixel, from its camera to Gemini integrations, what do you make of new AI-first devices like the Friend pendant, which offer a new form-function beyond a phone, laptop, or tablet? Or the yet-to-come "family of devices" OpenAI has mentioned?
A consumer wants to communicate, and so I do think there's something interesting about our industry leaping 10 steps ahead of where our consumer is. In all of the research that we're seeing, back to that 50% adopting, 50% rejecting is because, in some ways, the industry is forcing AI into consumers' hands.
With Pixel, we're running on a Google stack; it is our tensor chip that enables our software and our AI to perform better and faster. But that is not how we're telling the story, and consumers are not yet asking any brand for it.
What we want to do is stay at the forefront to ensure that customers know, for example, if they're using Camera Coach, that it is actually powered by our Gemini model. All Camera Coach does for you is help you take a better shot. So, we're not overindexing on the AI story of what powers Camera Coach, but we are making sure consumers know that our technology allows you to do things easier, faster, and better.
We also know that people are buying devices for these top five reasons: hardware, form factor, brand, price, and the operating system. If we don't overdeliver on those particular specs that's driving the buy, then AI will be meaningless.
So it's what's inside that counts!
Exactly! And it's been an interesting education with the consumer, because if you start to look at their recall, what comes back for Google Pixel, every time is, "man, that camera's cool."
But, inside that camera is Auto Best Take, which allows you to add someone else to a photo and even crop that person into the photo. That's Gemini-powered. We're not talking about the power of Gemini; we're talking about everybody deserves to be in the photo; you don't just have to take a selfie.
The way we think about hardware, software, and AI as a stack is critically important. Not necessarily leading with an AI conversation, but what it does for you.
How are you fighting to keep exploring big non-AI ideas when Google is so focused on AI?
With the devices team, it is a very interesting proposition that we offer as the only hardware division inside Google, which is a software-first company.
Within Google Pixel, and I would include FitBit in that as well as our home devices, we remind ourselves that the reason for being for our products in today's consumer mindset is the hardware, the software, battery life, and the basic fundamentals of what it takes to drive a best-in-class device.
It takes about a year to make a phone, and that phone is going to hit a shelf no matter what, and so we harness the right AI features and stories that we want to bring into our devices. It's quite a magical process, but making sure that we never forget that these things are two parts equally important, versus software and AI always leading, you've got to have beautiful hardware. You cannot miss a beat.
To go in a different direction, the race to secure top talent is reaching new heights; you've seen the multimillion-dollar pay packages. What is most important when recruiting for AI talent?
What you're seeing from Google is we're getting the best talent in the world bar none across every subfunctional area of expertise, whether we're talking engineers, product management, product marketing, all the way through to creativity, And first of all, before the AI race, the qualifications that it takes to get into Google, the bar is extreemly high, so that has not changed.
In marketing, we seek curious, AI-first thinkers. By AI-first, I mean the way of making has completely broken itself and rebuilt itself overnight.
You would write a brief on paper, you would storyboard an idea and a concept, and you would then go shoot a mock to make sure it actually works. Right now, if you have a thought of a brief, you could put that into Gemini Live. It will triangulate that brief with the insights we're seeing in the social sphere, what we're hearing from YouTube, and what we're seeing from our insights team.
I always write a brief, and I ask, "What would a cynical consumer say?" and it tells me a story that I might not have thought about. What's interesting about the kind of talent we need is that it has to be a curious talent that isn't afraid of AI, but instead harnesses it to create better outputs and outcomes for the organization.
We're using Veo 3, our own product, to shoot every concept before we go to market. We literally have shaved 15 weeks off the go-to-market process because we know how to harness our own Google tools. But we have people on our side of the fence that actually want to lean in, and you know, there's a lot of trial, there's a lot of error, a lot of teaching the model on how we want to think about the world.
However, this is a once-in-a-generation moment where we are shaping the future tools.
What else should people know about your team at Pixel?
The Google Pixel team is extremely bullish and excited to bring our new products to market.
Whether it's through creativity, products like Nano Banana — that broke the App Store because it's been so well-received — all the way through to everyday productivity tools, we're seeing our consumers lean in and understand how to harness our devices in ways they cannot with our competitors.
As I always tell our team, as a challenger, we are the underdog in this game, but it's the best place to be in order to punch above our weight, show consumers what's possible.
It's not lost on me that I'm taking notes on this interview on an iPhone, but maybe next time it will be a Pixel!
It's OK! If it had been a Pixel, it would have intuitively picked up what was coming next. It's funny; before I came to Google, I was a lifetime Apple user. Marketers normally are.
When you come in and then switch OSs over to Pixel, you first notice the camera and the video quality. You're also a content creator, so you will want a Pixel.
That whole agentic space we're headed into is always best done on a premium Android device, and most specifically, I'd say within a Pixel.
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