Apple has just appointed a new head of AI with Google and Microsoft experience, after John Giannandrea stepped down

In a carefully worded announcement on Monday, Apple said that John Giannandrea, who has been the company’s head of artificial intelligence since 2018, will “step down” to no longer work at Apple. He will stay on through the spring semester as an advisor.

He will be replaced by Amar Subramanya, a highly regarded Microsoft executive who spent 16 years at Google, most recently as engineering lead on Gemini Assistant. It’s a smart hire, given that Subramanya knows the competition well.

She described this move as a shake-up. It seemed inevitable in the past. Apple Intelligence, the company’s answer to the ChatGPT moment, has been floundering since its launch in October 2024. Reviews ranged from “disappointing” to downright annoyed.

The first months were some of the most difficult. The notification summary feature, intended to condense multiple alerts into easy-to-understand snippets, generated a series of embarrassing and incorrect headlines in late 2024 and early 2025. Among other errors, the BBC complained twice after Apple Intelligence falsely reported that Luigi Mangione, the man accused of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, had shot himself (he didn’t), and that darts player Luke Littler had won a semi-final tournament Until it started.

Then there was the promised Siri overhaul, which became a black eye for Apple.

A Bloomberg investigation, published in May, revealed the depth of Apple’s difficulties in the field of artificial intelligence. For example, when Craig Federighi, Apple’s software chief, tested the new Siri on his own phone just weeks before its planned launch in April, he was dismayed to discover that many of the features the company was touting didn’t work. The launch has been postponed indefinitely, prompting class-action lawsuits from iPhone 16 buyers who were promised an AI-powered assistant.

By that point, Giannandrea had already been sidelined, according to Bloomberg. Tim Cook stripped Siri of Giannandrea’s full oversight in March, handing her over to Vision Pro creator Mike Rockwell, the news organization reported. Apple has removed its secretive robotics division from Giannandrea’s control as well.

The Bloomberg investigation painted a picture of organizational dysfunction, with poor communication between AI and marketing teams, budget imbalances, and a leadership crisis so severe that some employees resorted to derisively describing Giannandrea’s group as “AI/MLess.” The report also documented the migration of AI researchers to competitors, including OpenAI, Google, and Meta.

Apple is now reportedly relying on Google’s Gemini to power the next version of Siri, a surprising and also humbling development, given the intense rivalry between the two companies that dates back more than 15 years, across mobile operating systems, app stores, browsers, maps, cloud services, smart home devices, and now artificial intelligence.

Giannandrea came to Apple from Google, where he ran machine intelligence and search. At Apple, he oversaw AI strategy, machine learning infrastructure, and Siri development.

Now Subramania inherits those responsibilities, reporting to Federighi with a clear mandate to help Apple catch up on AI.

It’s an interesting moment for the company. While competitors have been pouring billions of dollars into massive AI-powered data centers, Apple has focused on processing AI tasks directly on users’ devices using custom Apple Silicon chips, an approach that puts privacy first and avoids collecting user data. (When more complex requests require cloud processing, Apple routes them through Private Cloud Compute, servers that promise to process the data temporarily and delete it immediately.)

Whether this philosophy pays off or whether it has left Apple behind permanently is an outstanding question. Apple’s approach comes with obvious trade-offs. Among them, on-device models are smaller and less capable than the massive models running in competitors’ data centers, and Apple’s reluctance to collect user data has left its researchers training models on licensed, synthetic data rather than the giant troves of real-world information that feed its competitors’ systems.