How Google Public Sector’s RISE Unit Works: Show, Don’t Tell

Google Public Sector’s Rapid Innovation & Specialist Engineering (RISE) group is a bit of a vibe coding jazz band that aims to show customers what they can do via prototypes and then move it to production.

Projects have included a predictive subway car maintenance effort with New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) using Pixel devices, deploying Gemini for child welfare, and scaling GenAI.mil. RISE builds rapid prototypes and then hands them off to forward-deployed engineers (FDEs), who collaborate with deep specialist engineers across Google’s core technologies, including AI, security, platform, and data and analytics.

Google Public Sector formed RISE in January 2026 by merging its original Rapid Innovation Team and the Specialty Engineering organization. The goal is to bring innovation and design thinking directly to the public sector and build prototypes that can quickly move to AI agent workflows and projects.