Apple announced today that it has hired Lilian Rincon, a seasoned technology executive who spent nearly a decade at Google, as its new vice president of product marketing for artificial intelligence. Rincon will report directly to Greg “Joz” Joswiak, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing.
Rincon brings extensive experience in consumer-facing AI and e-commerce products. At Google, she most recently served as vice president of product for Google Shopping, where she led the global product organization responsible for consumer shopping experiences. Earlier in her tenure, she contributed to Google Assistant and held various product management roles. She joined Google around 2017 and also previously worked at Microsoft and Skype.
According to Apple, Rincon will oversee product marketing and product management for the company’s AI platforms, including Apple Intelligence and Siri.
The strategic hire arrives as Apple prepares to release a significantly upgraded version of its virtual assistant, Siri, later in 2026. The new Siri is being rebuilt as a more capable, chatbot-style assistant using technology from Alphabet’s Gemini AI model.
This marks a notable development in Apple’s AI strategy. Following earlier reports of delays with some Apple Intelligence features, the company entered a multi-year partnership with Google to leverage Gemini models for powering the enhanced Siri and future AI capabilities. The integration aims to make Siri more conversational, context-aware, and capable of handling complex tasks such as summarizing information, scanning documents, and performing multi-step actions.
Rincon’s background in marketing and managing high-profile consumer AI products (Shopping and Assistant) positions her well to help Apple communicate and position its AI offerings effectively against competitors like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s own Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot.
The appointment underscores Apple’s intensified focus on catching up in the generative AI race, where it has been perceived as lagging behind rivals in delivering advanced on-device and cloud-based AI features.
This follows other recent AI-related hires at Apple, including Amar Subramanya (formerly of Microsoft and Google) as VP of AI, who oversees research, models, and safety.
This is another part of Apple’s efforts to strengthen both the underlying technology and the user-facing marketing of its AI initiatives, particularly as the revamped Siri is expected to debut in iOS 27 and corresponding updates to macOS and iPadOS.
Apple has not disclosed additional details about Rincon’s start date or specific priorities in the role. The company continues to emphasize privacy and on-device processing where possible, while relying on partnerships like the one with Google for advanced model capabilities.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple continues to get its ducks in a row in the lead up to delivering a more competitive and intelligently marketed Apple Intelligence (AI) experience, including LLM Siri, across its ecosystem in the coming year.
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From Google.
You idiots!
Wow. This is taking forever.
I thought they were getting control of this mess a few years ago.
Apple might be out of the game soon.
Can’t seem to get their $h1t together.
As I was saying before, Siri is back on track.
Lilian will regret the hole she’s jumped into. (She will proclaim loudly, “Siri has never been on track” and, “indeed–Siri is an idiot”).
This “Apple Intelligence” fiasco reminds me of the Mac operating systems of 35 years ago.
Back in 1990 Apple had the core parts of “Pink” up and running in house. I knew engineers that were at Apple at the time and directly involved. It could have been the truly next generation of personal computer operating systems. Instead senior management kept pushing for various half-assed expansions of what became System 7 and such. None of the core elements of Pink really came to the public. Then Jobs came back after Apple bought Next’s operating system. But, Pink would have moved Apple forward as much as seven years earlier (and absolutely beaten Windows 95 to the punch), assuming a full fledged operating system had shipped by 1992, which according to people who were working on it at the time was deemed easily doable.
Apple did public demonstrations, and shipped with the Mac 840AV in 1993, a linguistic feat that could allow users to verbally command their Macs even with strong accents. The early versions were U.S. English only. The software was that capable and was even demonstrated on many stages. This capability of Macs was often informally referred to as “Casper” after the “friendly ghost”. This capability remained in Macs for many, many years thereafter, but was left to languish. Yes, Apple was, in a very rudimentary form, nearly a couple decades ahead of most other “personal computer” operating systems in this regard.
Could Apple have picked this up and started moving forward with it and vastly expanding it under early Mac OS X variants? Absolutely. Could what became Siri have been way ahead of any competitors? Probably. But Apple let it languish and Siri become a laughing stock.
Now Apple is buying into Google’s “AI” infrastructure, with the distinct chance that Apple’s claimed, “You are not the product.”, becoming a thing of the past. Further, it seems that Apple is hedging its bets on even the relationship with Google by stating the user can replace Siri or Google’s “AI” with any “AI” variant the user wants to use.
It sounds suspiciously like the Mac OS insanity of 1990 through 1999 and maybe even worse.