Josh Woodward

Woodward holds degrees from the University of OklahomaUniversity of OklahomaThe University of Oklahoma (OU) is the flagship public research university of the U.S. state of Oklahoma. It was created by the Oklahoma Territorial Legislature in 1890, 17 years before statehood; its main campus is in Norman, Oklahoma, with a health campus in Oklahoma City and a campus in Tulsa. It holds the Research 1 (R1) designation in the Carnegie Classification, its academic health system OU Health is the state’s leading academic health system, and its athletic teams, the Sooners, have competed in the Southeastern Conference (SEC) since 2024.Open the full entry and the University of OxfordUniversity of OxfordThe University of Oxford is a university in Oxford, England, where teaching existed in some form by 1096; it describes itself as the oldest university in the English-speaking world and is organised as a federal system of the university and dozens of self-governing colleges.Open the full entry.⁠[1]

He studied economics as an undergraduate; his master’s studies at Oxford examined the effect of U.S. military and economic aid on democracy.⁠[2]

Woodward joined Google in 2009 as a product management intern and went on to hold several product manager roles, with repeated promotions.⁠[3][2]

Early in his time at Google he helped co-found the Next Billion Users effort and helped create Chromebooks, with a focus on making technology more accessible to everyone.⁠[1][4]

In 2022 Woodward joined Google Labs.⁠[3]

He led the development of NotebookLM, which began inside Google as Project Tailwind, an idea from former Google senior product manager Raiza Martin, and was first introduced under that name at Google I/O 2023.⁠[3][5]

He brought author Steven Johnson onto the NotebookLM team as a visiting scholar and pushed for the team to gather user feedback on Discord rather than Google Meet; by December 2025 the Discord server had more than 200,000 members.⁠[3]

He set up a “block” system for employees to flag product obstacles and a “Papercuts” process for fixing small product problems, and helped the NotebookLM team obtain more TPU capacity when it faced shortages.⁠[3]

Under his leadership Google Labs also built AI Studio for developers and Project Mariner, an AI agent that can navigate web browsers and complete tasks on its own.⁠[6][7]

He demonstrated products himself at Google I/O 2023, and at I/O 2024 he presented AI products following the Android segment.⁠[2]

Before Google I/O 2024 he proposed Demo Slam, an internal showcase of experimental products, to CEO Sundar Pichai; a second edition was held during I/O week in 2025.⁠[3]

On April 2, 2025, Google confirmed that Woodward would take over the Gemini app from Sissie Hsiao while continuing to lead Google Labs; Hsiao’s departure took effect immediately, and she planned a short break before returning to Google in a new role.⁠[6][7]

In a staff memo, Google DeepMindGoogle DeepMindGoogle DeepMind is Google’s artificial intelligence research organization, formed in April 2023 by merging DeepMind, which Google acquired in 2014, with the Brain team from Google Research, and led by CEO Demis Hassabis. It developed AlphaGo, AlphaFold, and the Gemini family of models, and Hassabis and John Jumper received the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold’s protein structure prediction work.Open the full entry CEO Demis HassabisDemis HassabisDemis Hassabis is a British artificial intelligence researcher and entrepreneur, co-founder of DeepMind and its CEO and that of Google DeepMind from 2010 to 2026, and since then Chair of Google DeepMind, Chief Scientist of Alphabet and CEO of Isomorphic Labs; a former chess prodigy and game designer, he shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with John Jumper for AlphaFold’s protein structure prediction, and has appeared twice on the Lex Fridman Podcast.Open the full entry said the move would “sharpen our focus on the next evolution of the Gemini app.” Hsiao’s own memo described her time leading the team as “chapter 1” and said she was optimistic about handing “chapter 2” to Woodward.⁠[7][8]

After Woodward took over, the Gemini app team launched the image generation feature Nano Banana in late August 2025. By the end of September 2025 more than 5 billion images had been generated with Gemini, and the Gemini app briefly overtook ChatGPT at the top of the App Store.⁠[3][2]

In an October 2025 episode of Peter Yang’s podcast Behind the Craft, Woodward said: “We put a huge premium on how fast you can go from idea to being in people’s hands.” He advised watching real users in a product’s early days: “When you’ve built something amazing, you see it in people’s eyes when they use it.”⁠[9]

On July 16, 2026, Woodward announced on Google’s blog that NotebookLM was being renamed Gemini Notebook; it remained a standalone product, and notebooks could also be created and accessed in the Gemini app. He wrote that more than 30 million people and over 600,000 organizations used it.⁠[5]

In 2025 Woodward was named to TIMETIMETIME is an American newsmagazine and media brand founded by Henry Luce and Briton Hadden, which published its first issue on March 3, 1923; it is headquartered in New York and known for its Person of the Year selection and the TIME100 list. Since 2018 it has been personally owned by Marc and Lynne Benioff; its current Chief Executive Officer is Jessica Sibley, and its Editor-in-Chief is Sam Jacobs.Open the full entry’s TIME100 AI list.⁠[3]