About 90% of game developers have now incorporated AI into the video-game production process, according to Google Cloud gaming chief Jack Buser, a fact the tech giant exec said “was not true a couple years ago.”
“This will come as no surprise to any of your listeners, but this has been the year of AI,” Buser said during this week’s episode of Variety‘s “Strictly Business” podcast. “Google, we were there at the very forefront of AI, specifically AI and games. If you look at a lot of the foundational research coming out of [Google’s] DeepMind, a lot of that stuff is related to games, believe it or not. So we’ve always been on the forefront of AI for games now, for many years. But this was the year when it became real.”
Generative AI has been the main topic of conversation at every game developer conference for the past few years, but until 2025, it was “a lot of vision,” Buser said. “It was a lot of like, ‘These are some early examples of some proofs of concepts that we’ve seen at some of our customers. These are some early examples of where we think the industry might be going.’ But this year it became concrete.”
Before taking on his current role as director of game industry solutions at Google Cloud, Buser was a key member of the team that created Googles short-lived gaming streaming service Stadia, and prior to that, he spent a decade at Sony working on its PlayStation Now, PlayStation Home and PlayStation Plus products. With the rise and fall of Stadia (which shuttered in January 2023) alone, Buser has seen his share of gaming industry shifts, and says all the talk surrounding an AI revolution over the past few years was, until now, just talk. Heading into 2026, it’s all reality and it’s only growing.
“This has been really a year of watching all of this vision, all of this prediction that we had from a couple of years ago, actually become real and it’s been just tremendous to watch,” Buser said. “Every so often in the games industry, you get this wave of technological breakthrough. We’re in the middle of one right now with AI, but we’ve seen this kind of thing before. Those of your listeners that have played games for a long time will remember when games went 3D, when they went from cartridge to CD-ROM. You had this huge transformation in the industry. After CD-ROMs, games just looked and played differently. Development teams looked and developed differently. The industry went through this radical shift in those days. We’re in the middle of one right now with AI. A lot of technology comes to the games industry, and I’ve been in it for nearly thirty years, so I’ve seen technology that hasn’t quite made it in the industry — but this was the year where AI really tipped the scale and it has arrived.”
“Strictly Business” is Variety’s weekly podcast featuring conversations with industry leaders about the business of media and entertainment. (Please click here to subscribe to our free newsletter.) New episodes debut every Wednesday and can be downloaded at Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Spotify, Google Play, SoundCloud and more.
