Senior Director / Distinguished Software Engineer at Google DeepMind
PrepTimes Spring 2026

In the spring of 1997, Alex Gruenstein, then a junior at College Prep, was watching history unfold. Chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov had just lost to Deep Blue, IBM’s chess supercomputer, and Alex was paying attention. He happened to be enrolled in Sharona Barzilay’s “Issues in Science” class, and he wrote about the match. That paper, in a way, pointed toward a career.

Nearly three decades later, Alex leads a team at Google DeepMind working to give Gemini, Google’s flagship AI, the ability to actually do things on your behalf. His team connects AI to the tools people already use: Gmail, Calendar, Docs, or music apps on your phone. They give it a virtual computer, a web browser, and the ability to schedule future tasks. Most recently, they launched Gemini Spark, a 24/7 virtual assistant. In practice, this means that every morning, Alex’s AI synthesizes project updates from his team into a document, and when someone emails him a question, it automatically pulls together relevant background information he can draw on for his reply. Outside of work, it tracks communications from his kids’ schools and extracurriculars and distills what actually matters.

 

Alex is keenly aware of concerns about AI, and he has a reframe to offer. “I think of AI as a tool that lets me explore more deeply and solve problems faster,” he says. “Ideally, it’s an amplifier for my curiosity.” He describes it as a tool, a personal assistant, and a sparring partner. “It’s really a force multiplier, something that extends what one person can do.” Alex imagines being able to build a business on his own that once would have required significant capital and a team of people. “Just the way cloud computing meant a few people could do a startup without building their own data center, now it’s one step further.”

The framing that AI is an amplifier rather than a replacement  is central to how Alex thinks about its use in education, too. He’s watched his own kids navigate this. His younger son uses it to get explanations of things he doesn’t understand and his older daughter uses it when she’s stuck on a calculus problem to get feedback and a nudge in the right direction. Both still feel some guilt about it, and Alex pushes back on that response. “If you’ve got a personal or professional goal to accomplish, think about if and how AI can help,” he says. “At the end of the day, you own the work and the outcome.”

Alex is also clear that AI doesn’t change what matters most in education. His undergraduate major at Stanford, Symbolic Systems, wove together computer science, philosophy, psychology, and linguistics. That kind of interdisciplinary foundation, he argues, is more valuable than ever. The ability to think critically, write precisely, and define a problem clearly is exactly what makes someone effective at directing AI. “Software engineers now spend a lot of time formulating the problem precisely and getting AI to do the tedious work they used to spend hours on,” he explains. At the end of the day, he adds, “you are dealing with other humans, so being able to communicate well is incredibly important.”

Emotional intelligence, he notes, isn’t going anywhere. At Google, where everything is “deeply collaborative,” personal connections and the ability to build trust remain irreplaceable. “It’s not just an AI army,” he says. “You still need a lot of EQ so that people will want to work with you.”

For a student who once wrote a paper about a chess match and ended up at DeepMind, the advice he offers feels hard-earned: stay curious, use every tool available, and don’t confuse the struggle with the point. The struggle is how you learn. AI, at its best, just helps you struggle toward something more interesting.