Apple has recently carried out a rare restructuring of its senior management to revive its stagnant AI project. CEO Tim Cook lost confidence in AI department head John Jaannapini and instead appointed Vision Pro head Mike Rockwell to take over Siri's voice assistant business. This adjustment highlights Apple's sense of urgency to lag behind its competitors in the AI field.
Rockwell will report directly to software director Craig Federichi, bringing Siri business completely out of the jurisdiction of Jaannapini. The Vision Pro team, originally led by Rockwell, will be taken over by hardware engineer Paul Mead. Although Jaanapini retained his AI research responsibilities, his power was further dispersed, suggesting that his influence was reduced.
Bloomberg pointed out that Rockwell is good at Vision Pro's hardware breakthroughs, but lacks experience in managing AI teams. Cook may hope to embed AI technology more closely into product development through this adjustment, but team running-in, technology maturity and market competition are still major challenges.
Apple's AI platform "Apple Intelligence" has delayed the iPhone 16 promotional function due to immaturity in technology, and the company's stock price has fallen 14% this year. At the internal "Top100" executive meeting, AI was listed as a key issue, and Cook believes that it is difficult for the existing team to implement the product. In the past year, Apple's AI team has suffered repeated setbacks in the development of Siri function. The new features displayed at the 2024 WWDC Conference have been postponed many times, even causing "anger and embarrassment" among internal employees.
Faced with these challenges, Apple executives held an emergency meeting to acknowledge that the development of some functions was "much slower" than expected. At the meeting, Jaanapini bluntly stated that the project delay was "ugly", but did not give a clear solution.