Games, Teams, and Moonshots: Google Cloud’s Will Grannis

Will Grannis discovered his love for technology playing Tron and Oregon Trail as a child. After attending West Point and The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, he translated his passion for game theory into an aptitude for solving problems for companies, a central component of his role as founder and leader of the Office of the CTO at Google Cloud. Will leads a team of customer-facing technology leaders who, while tasked with bringing machine learning solutions to market, approach their projects with a user-first mindset, ensuring that they first identify the problem to be solved. Will makes it clear that great ideas don’t only come from the obvious subject-area experts in the room; diverse perspectives, coupled with a codified approach to innovation, lead to the best ideas. The collaboration principles and processes Google Cloud relies on can be applied at other organizations across industries. Read the episode transcript here. Read more about our show and follow along with the series at https://sloanreview.mit.edu/audio-series/me-myself-and-ai. Me, Myself, and AI is a collaborative podcast from MIT Sloan Management Review and Boston Consulting Group and is hosted by Sam Ransbotham and Shervin Khodabandeh. Our engineer is David Lishansky, and the coordinating producers are Allison Ryder and Sophie Rüdinger. Your reviews are essential to the success of Me, Myself, and AI. For a limited time, we’re offering a free download of MIT SMR’s best articles on artificial intelligence to listeners who review the show. Send a screenshot of your review to [email protected] to receive the download. Guest bio: Will Grannis is the founder and leader of Google Cloud’s CTO Office, a team of senior engineers whose mission is to foster collaborative innovation between Google and its largest customers. Prior to joining Google in 2015, Grannis spent the last two decades as an entrepreneur, enterprise technology executive, and investor, building and scaling technical platforms that today power commerce, transportation, and the public sector. He’s been a developer, product manager, CTO, SVP of Engineering, and CEO, building a wide variety of platforms and teams along the way. We encourage you to rate and review our show. Your comments may be used in Me, Myself, and AI materials. We want to know how you feel about Me, Myself, and AI. Please take a short, two-question survey.