Apple today announced that John Giannandrea, the company’s Senior VP for Machine Learning and AI Strategy, will be stepping down early next year. Giannandrea’s departure comes in the wake of Apple missing the boat on generative AI, a misstep that currently leaves Apple playing catch-up in the AI space. Compounding matters is that many of Apple’s ongoing efforts to implement AI across its platforms have paled in comparison to some of the more exciting innovations we’ve seen from companies like OpenAI and Google.
Stepping in for Giannandrea will be Amar Subramanya who, for the past six months, has served as Microsoft’s corporate VP of AI. Prior to that, he was a VP of Engineering at Google where he worked on AI software like Gemini. “Subramanya will be leading critical areas, including Apple Foundation Models, ML research, and AI Safety and Evaluation,” Apple’s press release reads in part. “The balance of Giannandrea’s organization will shift to Sabih Khan and Eddy Cue to align closer with similar organizations.”
It remains to be seen if Apple’s AI woes will become a thing of the past with Subramanya at the helm. What is certain, though, is that Apple’s AI team needed a drastic shakeup. Aside from the fact that Apple’s AI efforts have been lackluster, there are reports that confidence within Apple regarding AI is low. Just a few weeks ago, a report emerged claiming that some Apple engineers are already worried that the next-gen version of Siri will not live up to expectations. What’s more, a Bloomberg report claims that if the upcoming Siri update fails to impress, there might be an exodus of top AI talent from Apple sooner rather than later.
Apple has been losing a lot of AI talent
A big problem Apple has had to contend with in recent months is that it’s losing a lot of its top AI talent. During the latter half of 2025 alone, Apple has lost a number of its top AI engineers and researchers. In many cases, these employees jumped ship to Meta, lured in by incredibly lucrative compensation packages. This past October, for example, Meta hired former Apple executive Ke Yang. Though not a household name, Yang was spearheading Apple’s burgeoning “Answers, Knowledge, and Information” team, a group tasked with improving Siri’s ability to provide accurate answers to general knowledge questions.
There’s no denying that Apple’s AI efforts have failed to impress, but Apple CEO Tim Cook remains optimistic that the company can recover. “We’ve rarely been first,” Cook told employees at an internal meeting earlier this year. “There was a PC before the Mac; there was a smartphone before the iPhone; there were many tablets before the iPad; there was an MP3 player before iPod. But Apple invented the modern versions of those product categories. This is how I feel about AI.”
Cook has been optimistic about Apple’s AI efforts for years, so you might want to take his claim with a grain of salt. Still, the good news is that we wont have to wait long to see if Apple can ably compete in the AI market. Assuming there are no hiccups, Cook during Apple’s recent earnings conference call said that Apple’s AI-powered version of Siri is still on track for a release in March or April of 2026.
