After the Apple Intelligence roll-out debacle, the company is shaking up its executive team in charge of Siri. As per Bloomberg, Apple CEO Tim Cook has lost confidence in the ability of AI head John Giannandrea to deliver on the promise of Apple Intelligence.
John Giannandrea is being replaced by Mike Rockwell, who is the vice president of Vision Products Group and lead the development of Vision Pro. It is important to note that this news has not been officially announced by Apple yet, but only internally to employees.
The news came as a result of a Top 100 annual group offsite, which includes Apple’s top leadership where important decisions around the company are made. As expected, issues around the company’s ability to deliver on its AI promises were under focus.
Despite the move, John Giannandrea, an ex-Googler, will remain at Apple for the time being. He will continue his role of overseeing research, testing and technologies related to AI, as well as robotics.
Even though Apple Intelligence already made a mark on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS in certain ways, it failed to deliver on its biggest promise which as a personalized version of Siri that would have blown away the competition. Apple presented concept videos of the feature but nothing out of it made to the public. The company had to announce a delay saying that the features would be released next year, which could be either in iOS 19 or 2026.
Internally, the delay has been labeled as ugly by a manager in the Siri team, which has left many team members as angry and embarrassed.
In the face of other features that Apple released, this may seem like a small delay, however, it feels like a revisit of MobileMe and Siri may just need to be put out to pasture in the same way. It is going to be very difficult to bounce back from this reputation harm for the company, even if they are able to deliver on the technology now.
Even though Vision Pro has not been a major success for Apple, it has been an amazing product from a technology perspective. This is why Rockwell is now being put in charge of Siri, and will be reporting to Craig Federighi.
Other recent changes in the Siri team include Kim Vorrath and Aimee Nugent. Kim is known in Apple to help bring “order and execution” to trouble development projects and was moved to the AI group to report to Giannandrea, back in January. She will not be moved under Federighi. Aimee has a similar reputation and is expected to play a major role under Rockwell in the AI group.
