Vision Pro chief Mike Rockwell is Apple’s new Siri team leader

Apple reportedly made a key change to its leadership team after failing to deliver the personalized AI-infused Siri features demoed back at the WWDC24 on time.

Apple’s AI chief, John Giannandrea, who also managed the Siri team, is reportedly out. Tim Cook “has lost confidence in the ability of AI head John Giannandrea to execute on product development,” reporter Mark Gurman wrote on Bloomberg.

Giannandrea will remain the AI boss, but Siri is no longer his responsibility; the company apparently replaced him with Mike Rockwell, who led the Vision Pro team and is now the executive in charge of the troubled digital assistant. He was a Dolby Labs executive before joining Apple’s hardware engineering group in 2015.

Also, Apple appointed Paul Meade, who worked on hardware engineering for the Vision Pro headset, to lead the Vision Pro team instead of Rockwell.

Vision Pro chief Mike Rockwell now leads the Siri team

The write-up explores how Apple’s leadership is addressing internal efforst to put the artificial intelligence projects at the company back on track.

Rockwell will report to software chief Craig Federighi, removing Siri completely from Giannandrea’s command. Apple is poised to announce the changes to employees this week. The iPhone maker’s senior leaders—a group known as the Top 100—just met at a secretive, annual offsite gathering to discuss the future of the company. Its AI efforts were a key talking point at the summit, Bloomberg News has reported.

In other words, Siri is now under Federighi’s software engineering group. If Federighi and his team cannot fix Siri, I’m not sure anyone can.

Siri—the AI division’s main consumer product—has had a number of bosses over the years. When Apple first launched the voice assistant in 2011, it was overseen by software executive Scott Forstall. It was then given to services chief Eddy Cue in 2012 and transferred to the current software head, Federighi, in 2017. Giannandrea took it over a year later. Now it will be led by Rockwell, with oversight returning again to Federighi.

Rockwell brings with him deep technical experience and proven ability to manage huge development teams with thousands of people.

Rockwell is a problem solver

Gurman writes:

Rockwell is known as the brains behind the Vision Pro, which is considered a technical marvel but not a commercial hit. Getting the headset to market required a number of technical breakthroughs, some of which leveraged forms of artificial intelligence.

And this:

He is now moving away from the Vision Pro at a time when that unit is struggling to plot a future for the product. Over the last decade, Rockwell has been one of the few Apple executives to take a major hardware device from “zero to one”—industry parlance for conceiving a new product and bringing it to market.

He proved his worth as the Vision Pro leader but lacks prior experience as an AI leader, so it remains to be seen whether he can help the Siri team deliver the overdue features. The iPhone maker also charged Kim Vorrath, the fixer inside Apple, with whipping Siri and Apple Intelligence into shape.

The buck stops with Tim Cook

Gurman continues:

Giannandrea will remain at the company, even with Rockwell taking over Siri. An abrupt departure would signal publicly that the AI efforts have been tumultuous—something Apple is reluctant to acknowledge. Giannandrea’s other responsibilities include oversight of research, testing and technologies related to AI. The company also has a team reporting to Giannandrea investigating robotics.

This illustrates the tremendous turmoil amongst Apple’s executive ranks caused by the recent Apple Intelligence missteps. John Giannandrea isn’t just another high-level manager. Apple poached Giannandrea away from Google, where he led the company’s search efforts, back in 2018. He was named its senior vice president of machine learning and AI strategy, reporting directly to Tim Cook.

It is a huge misstep that he failed to create usable underlying technology for the Siri assistant. It would have been even better if Apple had fired Giannandrea, but doing so would have probably spooked investors and made the case for more resignations and firings across the company. This isn’t the first time Cook failed to put an outside hire in a position to succeed. Ultimately, though, the buck stops with Cook.

The Siri crisis

Apple recently made an unusual move by publicly admitting that an AI-infused Siri assistant is a tougher challenge than initially anticipated. The company said the promised features would roll out “in the coming year” without providing a firmer timeline or explaining what went wrong.

Following the announcement, Mark Gurman then learned from his sources about a hands-on meeting at Apple regarding Siri’s future. Instead of firing people in charge of the effort, Apple has praised the Siri team for their hard work so far and pledged not to deliver the new Siri features until they’re ready for prime time.

Robby Walker, Apple’s senior director overseeing the Siri team, allegedly told the team that Apple’s customers “are not expecting only these new features but they also want a more fully rounded-out Siri.” He assured the team that Apple would “ship these features and more as soon as they are ready.”

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