Corey duBrowa

Having just celebrated my five-year Googleversary, this one’s a little bittersweet for me.

It’s been an amazing half-decade run at #google – we’ve grown the Global Communications and Public Affairs team by more than 2X during that time, built a modern measurement team and system, hired some of the best content people on the planet, assembled an internal communications squad that put the company on its shoulders during the pandemic and generally rose to a world-class level across the board. It has been the honor of a lifetime to lead this amazing team of communications professionals during what has proven to be one of those “once in a generation” inflection points for our industry, when #AI is playing such a formative role in tech (and for the communications profession too).

But this was a once-in-a-lifetime offer I just couldn’t pass up.

I am pleased to announce that in August, I have been given the opportunity to lead BCW Global as the company’s CEO – at a time when the agency named after the late, great communications legend Harold Burson (cited by PRWeek as the most influential public relations figure of the 20th century) is now the third largest communications and public affairs firm in the world and when the more than 4600 individuals who take such great care of our clients in more than 100 global offices in nearly 40 countries worldwide are poised to deliver the kind of counsel and work that Mr. Burson himself would have been so proud to see.

I quoted Mr. Burson earlier this year at the PR Week Awards in New York City: “In the beginning, top management used to say ‘here’s the message, deliver it.’ Then it became ‘what should we say?’ Now, in smart organizations, it’s ‘what should we do?’” This bias toward action and behavior (vs. mere words) is what appeals to me about the legacy of this great firm. I had the chance to meet Mr. Burson late in his life at an THE ARTHUR PAGE SOCIETY event in New York City and the discussion made a huge impression on me (thank you for that moment, Roger Bolton). I am humbled to be able to walk in the footsteps of such a giant and am incredibly energized by the chance to work with Mark Read and team as part of the broader WPP family of firms. There is so much opportunity ahead for BCW and I am eager to get started.

But I’d be remiss if I didn’t take a beat and thank Sundar Pichai and the 600+ amazing, creative and wise minds who comprise the Google Global Communications and Public Affairs team. I learned so much from them – not just about communications, but about what it means to be a leader. Of the many gifts that have been bestowed upon me over the course of a three-decade-plus career, joining Google and leading this team has been among the greatest of them all. Thank you.

See you soon, BCW team!

✌

CdB

P.S.: for those of you who have asked, the one-of-one Nike #google kicks (h/t to my talented friend, Jeffrey Waskowiak) have been bequeathed to Sundar's office, to do as he chooses. 👟

Bard is here! (not Shakespeare, ha)

Excited to share that Google has just launched  our early experiment that lets people collaborate with generative AI. Bard is powered by our latest version of LaMDA, a large language model which draws from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses.

My colleagues Sissie Hsiao and Eli Collins put it best when they said, “You can use Bard to boost your productivity, accelerate your ideas and fuel your curiosity. You might ask #Bard to give you tips to reach your goal of reading more books this year, explain quantum physics in simple terms or spark your creativity by outlining a blog post. We’ve learned a lot so far by testing Bard, and the next critical step in improving it is to get feedback from more people.”

I’m grateful to have a front row seat in the making of this technology and I also want to give a shoutout to my colleague Lin-Hua Wu and her team for their tremendous work on communications around Bard. This blog post in particular is a great example (IMHO) of a piece that is fun, Googley and appropriately humble for a work that's still in progress… not easy to do when we’re covering technical content.

You can sign up to try Bard at bard.google.com. We’re rolling out access in the US and UK today and expanding over time to more countries and languages.

There’s a lot of exciting work ahead to bring helpful AI experiences to people, businesses and communities. I can’t wait to see what the future holds.

#Google #GoogleAI #Bard #ethicalAI

https://lnkd.in/gDk2jWer

https://lnkd.in/gejMva74