Natalie Piucco
Field CTO
GOOGLE CLOUD AUSTRALIA
“Treat every problem as yours to figure out, using whatever tools exist to do it.”
Read Natalie's My Tech Journey Q+A
1. Who are you and what was your path into tech?
I’m Natalie Piucco, Field CTO for Google Cloud Australia, focused on Applied AI. In plain English: I help Australian businesses, from ASX companies to fast-moving startups, actually build with and adopt AI. Not just talk about it, not just buy the licence, actually change how they work. I live in Sydney with my 2 year old Harrison and my husband Dean.
I recently rummaged through a box at my parents’ place, the one you keep putting off, and found a Year 6 merit award that said “thank you for sharing your knowledge and skills of IT with the class.” So the breadcrumbs were always there. I was the kid running the Apple Mac roster and teaching the teachers. I also built my dad’s first business website.
I grew up in a family of Italian immigrants, hard-working small business owners and engineers. Business and learning how things worked were dinner table conversations. I was also the kid with olives and polenta in her lunchbox..
My path wasn’t linear. One of three girls at my high school to study IT. Quite ‘Uncool’ at the time. I then studied business at university, then applied for a Google engineering internship and somehow got it. I still can’t quite believe that happened. I was flown to Silicon Valley and around the world, learning to build systems that scaled to billions from founders of the internet. A degree you couldn’t buy.
I found my niche along the way: closing the gap between what technology can do and what businesses actually do with it and helping business leaders and founders think big.
I’ve trained 20,000+ people on AI and Data, led Google’s AI practice across Europe, launched six products including AI in Google Photos used by millions, and sat on venture boards where real capital gets deployed to real tech businesses. And my voice was used to train the Australian accent on the Google Assistant. My family are very proud of that last one.
2. What would surprise someone shadowing you for a day?
The sheer amount of context switching required in a job like this.
On any given day, it might be a technical deep-dive into how a fast moving start up who could be integrating Agentic Technology to in ASX board meeting helping them think about their AI Strategy and Adoption Plans, to shifting gears completely for my own governance and board duties with an Australian university or Google’s Investment Funds. Then I might finish with a Podcast recording with the Founders of Canva on AI adoption patterns. In between all of this I’ve got 100 tabs open and terminals, reading, listening, developing. I have a few agents that collect information for me so I am on top of what’s happening. Keeping up does not happen by accident but I do get a kick out of it. I think you have to in this kind of job.
Then I am home making dinner, I love to cook but terrible at clearing up and chasing around my toddler, Harrison. We live close to the beach so we might sneak in an evening walk while the sun goes down.
3. What’s the biggest career challenge you’ve overcome?
Going from a business background to a technical role. I had to learn networking, infrastructure, databases, security protocols, and development cycles basically from scratch, while doing the job. It was also one of the hardest but best things I’ve ever done.I feel like i now speak two languages – Business and technology.
A lot of people are living that transition right now, and honestly, AI is making it more possible than ever. That genuinely excites me.
But the harder challenge, and no one really talks about this, was once you have technology ground works, it’s overcoming the shift away from trying to solve every technical problem yourself to instead focusing on building the right frameworks and team dynamics to allow solutions to surface naturally.
4. Who has championed or supported your growth?
I’ve got to work with and learn from some of the best Product Technology Builders, Sellers and Investors in the world. Rob Pike, Mary Gourley, Neil French.
The ones who explained their thinking while they were doing it, who’d say “here’s why I’m making this call” or “watch what I’m about to do in this room and we’ll debrief after.” That’s the proximity that actually changes you. Not just being in the room where it happens, being in the room where someone explains how it happens, while it’s happening.
I try to pay that forward now whenever I’m mentoring others. Bring someone to watch the craft. Let them hear the thinking out loud. That’s where the real transfer happens, no course, book, or onboarding program comes close.
5. What makes your team or workplace unique?
At Google Australia, the uniqueness comes from the collision of massive, global engineering scale with very localized, practical problem-solving. We aren’t just talking about AI in the abstract; we are actively getting into the trenches with Australian businesses to apply it.
I’ve also learnt my leadership rule book here. A new type of playbook. It’s been a place where you’re encouraged to think really big, to think outside the box to find a problem and go and solve it, to build teams that are values aligned and filled with different perceptions and lived experiences because by nature we are building for the world.
6. What advice would you give to others starting out
Get into an office. I’m really glad I grew up in the office ‘days’. There is a magic in serendipity that I genuinely fear is being lost in tech and I’m sure it’s a big part of why my career went the way it did. Right place, right time, right conversation happening just as you walk past.
I am sure my surface luck increased because I was put in the boardroom of ASX 100 companies making major technology decisions and in the design rooms with the Engineering Directors Building for Billions of Users. Often in the early days because I happened to be part of hallway conversation or I simply asked if i could observe.
And then, there’s nothing more important early on than putting in the hours and doing the work. But at some point brute-force effort stops being the answer. The shift is learning to build personal sustainable systems like sleep & exercises learning how you learn… so you can scale your impact without scaling your stress. Peak long-term performance is a design problem.
7. What skill or technology will matter most in the next five years?
Technology: Without a doubt, Applied AI but specifically, the application part. The underlying models will keep advancing, that’s for sure. But the people and careers and businesses who will rocket in the next few years will be the ones who can stand between what AI is technically capable of and what a business actually needs ,then translate fluently in both directions. That’s systems thinking.
Combined with Deep industry knowledge and the ability to ask the right questions of the technology, not just use it you’re unstoppable.
Skill: The softer skills, even though I hate that word, will be how you see problems, and if you have ‘figureoutable’ mindset. An entrepreneur sees a problem and thinks: perfect, let me test my assumptions, build something fast, and scale what works. An employee mindset sees the same problem and says: not my department, nobody gave me the rulebook. That response made sense once. With AI at everyone’s fingertips, it’s becoming a liability. The boundaries between roles are paper walls now. The people who will succeed will be the ones who treat every problem as theirs to figure out, using whatever tools exist to do it. I think this mindset is completely learnable.
8. If you could change one thing about the tech industry, what would it be?
First: speed learning support for women coming back to tech after maternity leave. This became clear after having my son who is now 2. There’s a window around 35 where we lose 50% of female tech talent, and I am sure it’s partly because taking twelve months out in the in this industry can feel like five years anywhere else.. I treat learning and tech like a hobby, so I stayed plugged into my craft while having a young baby. But I appreciate this is not everyone’s approach and rightly so, so we desperately need ‘speed learning’ and re-entry mechanisms so returning mothers don’t feel like jumping onto a moving train.
Secondly, I want to see more transparency on what it takes to ‘be at the top of the game’ with young children. It’s one thing to celebrate someone standing on a stage launching a product, raising capital, or crushing a board presentation, but I want to see more stories of what happened that morning. I want to hear about the three night-wakes before the board meeting, the part time schedule and how it works, the grandparent who swooped in at the last minute, or the Sunday ‘fridge meeting’ which is the most important meeting of my family’s week, figuring out exactly what we are eating and who is moving where.
We need more real stories from parents not to make it look hard, but to make it look real, give us a laugh and to remind everyone they’re not doing it wrong.
