On March 9, 2026, Vaibhav Sisinty met in person with Josh Woodward for a filmed interview and demonstration of Google’s latest Labs projects and Gemini-powered tooling. Woodward, the Google executive who leads the teams behind Gemini, Google Labs and NotebookLM, walked through live product demos and discussed the teams’ design principles and priorities. The conversation — part demo, part rapid-fire Q&A — covered projects ranging from Pomelli and Stitch to NotebookLM, Genie and the Gemini app itself. India’s T20 win on March 8, 2026 is referenced in the interview; a reference to Google’s recent integration of ProducerAI into Google Labs was announced publicly in late February 2026. ProducerAI acquisition (late Feb 2026). Josh Woodward is listed among influential AI leaders and is a public face of Google Labs and Gemini. Time profile: Josh Woodward.
On how to respond to AI disruption: "Play" and co-create
Woodward repeatedly framed Google’s AI work as tooling rather than replacement. He said teams build products in partnership with the people who will use them — "we actually are working with marketing and creative directors on that product" — and emphasized that the best way for people to prepare is practical: try the tools and see where they fit. As he put it, "you just got to try it ... that frontier keeps moving out and it's jagged."
When asked for one line of advice for people worried about displacement, Woodward returned to that practice-oriented stance: play
. He described labs experiments as co-creation exercises — NotebookLM came from working with authors; Pomelli from working with marketers; Anti-Gravity from working with filmmakers — and said the goal is to put powerful tools in the hands of professionals so they become more prolific.
Pomelli: extract a business’s "DNA" and generate marketing
Woodward demonstrated Pomelli by dropping a nonprofit website URL into the tool. He described the first step as extracting a business’s identity — font, color palette, and page assets — and called the result a "business DNA." From that starting point Pomelli auto-generates campaigns and templates and, with the later photo-shoot feature, can produce on-brand photography and assets for download: "one little step, you get all this value."
"Can a tool be a marketing team?" he asked, and then explained the product’s intent: to give small businesses access to photography and creative collateral they otherwise couldn’t afford.
Stitch: design-first interfaces that produce prototypes and code
Stitch was presented as a design-first, "infinite canvas" tool that turns textual descriptions and visual edits into clickable prototypes. Woodward walked through creating screens, right-clicking to "make an instant prototype," and then grabbing front-end code for those screens. He described the workflow as design-led but code-backed: "any of these screens, you can rightclick and just grab the code and it'll pull this up and you've got all the front-end code ready to go."
NotebookLM: research, infographics and cinematic video overviews
NotebookLM remains a Labs flagship in Woodward’s description: a place to ingest many sources, do deep research, and turn findings into interactive outputs. He showed examples where NotebookLM ingests dozens of sources to produce island-by-island snapshots for a trip to Hawaii, and then demonstrated a new cinematic overview feature. According to Woodward, the system acts like an "assistant director," producing a script, choosing a visual style and composing audio and animation by converting code-based animations into videos: "everything is written using code" and Gemini will "write the code, and then drops it in."
"This whole thing...helps you understand anything. Whether you're planning a trip or you're a student or you're a teacher...you just drop in the sources and then you can start making stuff with it."
Genie: short-lived generative worlds and recorded play
Woodward described Genie as an experimental, world-building tool currently limited in scale. He demonstrated a small flying-bird world that streams each frame on the fly and emphasized its generative nature: every time you return the scene can be different. He noted technical and product limits — current worlds last about 60 seconds before they "collapse" — but positioned Genie as a look at future gaming, entertainment and embodied AI: "every frame is being generated on the fly" and "it shows kind of the potential we think of gaming, the potential maybe of entertainment, potential even of robotics and embodied AI."
Gemini: nano-edits, music generation and personal intelligence
On Gemini, Woodward demonstrated Nano Banana-style conversational editing, music templates and a personal intelligence experience that accesses a user’s opted-in signals (email, photos) for practical retrieval. He showed Gemini creating short celebratory music referencing a cricket result — the demo includes the phrase "India Champions T20, right? 96 runs" — and explained Google's acquisition of a music-focused product team to accelerate iterative music creation.
For personal intelligence, Woodward showed Gemini surfacing a past optometrist visit and a photo of a prescription after the user had enabled the feature: "I turned it on and then you can see like right eye... Left eye..." He positioned Gemini’s three Ps — personal, proactive, powerful — and discussed proactive assistance as a goal: why must users always prompt AI when sometimes they want AI to proactively surface and act on relevant information?
"The proactive is all about this idea of like why do I always have to be the one talking to AI?...what'll be true success for Gemini is like how much time does it save you in your day?"
Operational realities: compute demand, agent audit trails and review fatigue
Woodward acknowledged the operational constraints of rapid product launches. Asked about the "biggest lie in AI," he said the dominant issue on his teams is simple: "we just need more TPUs" — a reflection of compute demand. He also raised the growing cost of reviewing AI-generated code and the need to instrument agents with better audit trails: "the amount of kind of PRs and just code for review that's coming in is becoming the real bottleneck" and "there's a set of... stuff around the harness and being able to kind of understand what did the agent do that I feel is underexplored right now."
Skills and culture: taste, reinvention and AI-first problem solvers
On the skills that matter in an AI-first world, Woodward stressed taste and adaptability. He urged people to become "AI generalists" — problem solvers who think AI-first and can reinvent themselves as tools and workflows change. "Sometimes people's identity gets tied to a certain job... people that are kind of able to reinvent themselves and change with it is going to be maybe one of the top skills."
Rapid-fire takeaways
In the closing rapid-fire segment Woodward reiterated a few concise points: the frontiers of what can be handed to models keep shifting; the last several months have been a period of visible acceleration; and Google Labs treats many releases as experiments co-created with domain professionals. He ended on a practical note about daily practice: "Every Monday I kind of write a note to the team of here's all the cool stuff I saw in AI... I'm really trying to learn right now because it's changing so fast."
References
Interview video (Vaibhav Sisinty channel): Vaibhav Sisinty — YouTube.
Josh Woodward profile: Time — Josh Woodward.
ProducerAI acquisition coverage: MusicRadar — Google acquires ProducerAI (Feb 25, 2026).
T20 final referenced in the interview (context for interview timing): ICC — India v New Zealand: T20 World Cup final (Mar 8, 2026).
Josh Woodward (role & public posts): Josh Woodward — X.
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