Apple has reportedly made some leadership changes to speed up its development of artificial intelligence (AI) products.
The company has put Vision Pro creator Mike Rockwell in charge of its virtual assistant, Siri, and removed Siri from the oversight of AI head John Giannadrea, Bloomberg reported Thursday (March 20), citing unnamed sources.
Rockwell will report to software chief Craig Federighi, according to the report. He will leave the Vision Products Group (VPG) and be succeeded there by Paul Meade, who has run hardware engineering for the Vision Pro.
The moves have not yet been announced, but the news will be shared with Apple employees this week, per the report.
Apple did not immediately reply to PYMNTS’ request for comment.
The leadership changes follow an annual offsite meeting of Apple’s senior leaders, the “Top 100,” at which the company’s AI efforts were a key topic of discussion, according to the report.
The company’s AI system, Apple Intelligence, is considered a flop and efforts to add new features to Siri have been repeatedly delayed, the report said.
Rockwell has a demonstrated ability to ship new products and, with the Vision Pro, became one of the few Apple leaders over the last decade to take a major hardware device from conception to market, per the report.
Apple must move faster on AI improvements to Siri because consumers are starting to notice that the company’s AI is lagging behind competitors in the market, such as ChatGPT, the new Alexa, Google Gemini and others, Luc Julia, a co-designer of the original Siri and now chief scientific officer at French automaker Renault, told PYMNTS in an interview posted March 7.
“People are realizing more and more that they are not at the front end of the technology,” Julia said.
It was reported in February that Apple was dealing with tech issues that could delay its long-awaited Siri update. The company first introduced plans for a new, AI-powered version of the voice assistant at its developers conference last year, and went as far as to advertise some of its features, but was still scrambling to finish the software.
At the developers conference in June, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that the suite of AI features included in Apple Intelligence was set to “introduce a new chapter in Apple innovation.”
