Apple’s head of artificial intelligence, John Giannandrea, is stepping down from the company. The move comes as the Silicon Valley giant has lagged behind its competitors in rolling out generative AI features, in particular its voice assistant Siri. Apple made the announcement on Monday, thanking Giannandrea for his seven-year tenure at the company.
Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, said his fellow executive helped the company “in building and advancing our AI work” and allowing Apple to “continue to innovate”. Giannandrea will be replaced by longtime AI researcher Amar Subramanya.
Apple debuted its marquee AI product suite, Apple Intelligence, in June 2024, but has been slow to overhaul its products with generative AI in comparison to competitors such as Google. Apple has added incremental features, such as real-time language translation in its new AirPod earphones, a feature Google’s headphones added in 2017, and a fitness app that uses an AI-generated voice for chats during workouts, but major changes are still in the works.
The company has teased an AI-forward upgrade to Siri for more than a year, but the rollout has repeatedly been postponed.
“This work (on Siri) needed more time to reach our high-quality bar,” Craig Federighi, Apple’s vice-president of software engineering, said during the company’s developer conference in June.
In an earnings call the next month, Cook said Apple was “making good progress on a more personalized Siri” and promised a release next year.
With the appointment of Subramanya, Apple seems to be indicating a tighter focus on the company’s AI strategy. Subramanya previously worked as the corporate vice-president of AI for Microsoft and also spent 16 years at Google, where he was the head of engineering for its Gemini AI Assistant, seen as a leader in the industry. He will report to Craig Federighi, Apple’s head of engineering, who has also taken on a bigger role working on AI at the company in recent years.
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Cook said on Monday that Federighi “has been instrumental in driving our AI efforts, including overseeing our work to bring a more personalized Siri to users next year”. In its announcement, Apple wrote that this is a “new chapter” for the company as it “strengthens its commitment” to AI.
