Meet the Google Exec Trying to Convince a Skeptical Gaming Industry to Love AI

In a gold rush, the people who get rich aren’t the grubby prospectors digging for those nuggets in the muck; it’s the men who sell the shovels. In that vein, Google, with generative tools like Genie , Veo , and Gemini , is competing to become the biggest provider of AI for the gaming industry. I talked to the man at Google who’s in charge of selling the shovels.

Jack Buser has spent his entire career chasing tech that inevitably changes the gaming scene—often in unexpected ways. He’s currently the director of gaming for Google Cloud, but he began by pushing Dolby sound product support for consoles like the PlayStation 2 and Xbox. He moved on to PlayStation, where he worked on crafting PlayStation Home—the company’s Second Life clone and early metaverse—and later Sony’s nascent PlayStation Plus subscription. Then, he would move on to Google to work on Stadia, the company’s early adventure in cloud-based gaming, before the company decided to pull the plug in 2022 .

You can argue whether metaverse, subscriptions, and cloud gaming have had an overall positive impact on the games industry. AI, however, may still have an even larger impact on how we develop and play video games. Google has execs who are trying to pitch the company’s cloud servers and AI models to various industries—like health care or financial services. Buser is the gaming guy.

He may have an easier job selling it to developers and publishers than audiences who have lambasted any use of the tech in development. The devs behind 1666: Amsterdam found themselves in hot water after players discovered AI assets in preview trailers. Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 was littered with AI images that only helped to cheapen the experience. Even indie darling Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was raked over the coals for leaving AI assets in their game.

Buser’s been singing this pro-AI tune for a while, but beyond all that, the Google exec is a gamer. He started our conversation by asking me what his best option was for building his own Steam Machine and whether to go with SteamOS or Bazzite. He’s currently playing Donkey Kong Bananza on Swtich 2 during his global travels. He’s been a part of the industry for a while, and he agrees it’s not going well . He simply thinks AI is the answer to most—but not all—the industry’s woes. Do I agree with him? Not necessarily, but the situation with AI and game development is not nearly as clear cut as it seems.

During my interview with Buser, I referenced a separate Q&A with Luke Dicken, the former head of AI at Take Two Interactive—you know, the publisher of Rockstar Games and GTA VI . Dicken told Side Quest that the lingering question of AI in games is whether the cost of these models—i.e., how much publishers pay Google—creates a marked difference in development time, development cost, or end sales. It’s a question we may not know the answer to for years, especially when development timelines can be as long as four or five years, or even longer.

Below, read more about Bauer’s AI gaming dreams.