Tasked with leading the company’s global AI go-to-market strategy, Parker is not only evangelising Google’s latest AI models but also building out the commercial pathways that deliver these capabilities to clients.
“My role at Google – I lead our general AI go-to-market globally,” Parker explains. “Once it exits engineering and goes towards the field, how we take it to customers, think about segments, how we sell it: that’s my purview, but just for generative AI.”
That remit has grown rapidly. In just 18 months, Google Cloud’s generative AI business has moved from early incubation to being a central growth engine, powered by its Gemini model family.
“We saw a huge opportunity with generative AI, so we wanted to bootstrap that,” says Parker. “Now, we’re taking it to market from a technical as well as a client-facing standpoint.”
AI is not new territory for Google. Parker is quick to remind that the company’s foundation is built on AI, well before the current LLM boom.
“The whole company is an AI company. If you look at our mission to organise the world’s information, it’s never been more relevant,” he says. “Even before all the stuff we’re seeing now, we’ve been finishing people’s emails in Gmail for almost 10 years: that is a generative AI state capability.”
What is new, however, is the scale and sophistication of today’s AI systems and how quickly they’re becoming embedded across consumer and enterprise services. A major part of Parker’s strategy lies in agentic AI, systems that can plan, reason, and act on a user’s behalf.
“One client is building an employee onboarding agent,” he shares. “You show up, and it gets your bank account set up, payroll, healthcare, and a chain of 20 to 30 tasks. That’s going to be built inside our AgentSpace platform. It’s like an assistant, interacting with you across multiple stages of a journey.”
Use cases are also expanding into retail and travel. Parker describes the shift as moving from static tools to dynamic, goal-oriented agents. “A travel site won’t just show you flights anymore, it will plan your whole trip, recommend a resort, check flight times and costs, and book it. That’s all agent-based reasoning in the background.”
Underpinning all of this is Google’s deep investment across the AI stack, from custom silicon and infrastructure to models, platforms and tools. Parker believes this end-to-end integration gives Google a crucial edge.
“We’re the only company investing in all four layers of the AI stack. That means we can be the most performant at the best cost,” he argues. “Others are building great models, but losing significant amounts of money. We can drive efficiencies all the way through.”
The goal, says Parker, is to make AI adoption not only possible but affordable. “If you bring down the price of tokens, you’re lowering the barrier of entry to intelligence. That has massive ramifications for adoption, especially in the public sector.”
For Google Cloud, AI is not a short-term trend. It’s a platform shift, and Parker’s role is to ensure it lands in the hands of everyone, from enterprise clients to everyday users. “We’ve got the best ingredients. We’ve started making the meal.”
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