Apple has hired Lilian Rincon, formerly of Google, as VP of product marketing for AI — a signal of how seriously the company is treating its Siri rebuild this year.
Apple has hired Lilian Rincon, a former Google executive who spent nearly a decade overseeing the company’s shopping and assistant products, as vice president of product marketing for artificial intelligence. She will report to Apple’s marketing chief, Greg Joswiak.
The appointment arrives at a critical moment. Apple is preparing a substantially rebuilt version of Siri for release later this year, developed using technology from Google’s Gemini AI model — a significant architectural shift for a product that has long been criticised for falling behind competitors in capability and reliability.
Rincon’s background makes her a pointed choice. Her tenure at Google placed her at the centre of two product categories — shopping and AI assistants — that are directly relevant to what Apple is now trying to accomplish with Siri. Marketing an AI assistant that users have grown accustomed to underestimating will require more than a product launch; it will require a credible reintroduction of a product whose reputation has become a liability.
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The hire also underscores the degree to which Apple’s AI ambitions have become a marketing challenge as much as an engineering one. Rivals, including Google and OpenAI, have moved aggressively to define what capable AI assistance looks like in the consumer market. Apple, which has historically controlled its product narratives with unusual precision, is now building the team it believes can reclaim that ground.
