John Giannandrea leaves Apple: the man who failed to transform Siri and brain of the AI strategy ends his stage

Apple has announced that John Giannandrea, one of the most influential executives in its AI strategy in recent years, will begin a retirement process that will culminate in 2026. The company explains that the executive will leave his position as Senior Vice President of Machine Learning and AI Strategy, although he will continue to collaborate as an advisor in the coming months. This announcement comes months after a reshuffle of responsibilities related to Apple Intelligence and Siri. Giannandrea landed at Apple in 2018 as one of its most talked-about signings, with the task of reinforcing the AI strategy and giving Siri a new direction. His team was in charge of areas such as Apple Foundation Models, the internal search engine, and research in machine learning, technical pieces on which Apple has built a good part of its recent strategy. He also took on the responsibility of guiding the evolution of the voice assistant and coordinating AI projects that affected multiple teams within the company. A project that began with ambition. Apple Intelligence was born as a profound renewal of the user experience, but progress was not at the expected pace. The Information detailed that the demo shown at WWDC 2024 did not fully reflect the advanced capabilities that Apple had suggested, and that many of those functions were not implemented at the time of the presentation. The pressure increased when the company confirmed that the new Siri with personalized functions would be delayed until 2026. Internal war in Cupertino over the direction of AI. The tensions between the AI/ML group and the software team came from afar. While the area led by Giannandrea bet on a more cautious and privacy-focused advance, Craig Federighi defended a more pragmatic approach oriented towards tangible results. The clash of priorities became evident when some engineers began to refer to the AI/ML team as “AIMLess”, a sign of the accumulated discomfort. The situation led to a shift in March 2025 that placed Federighi and Mike Rockwell, a key figure in the Vision Pro, at the forefront of Siri’s new direction. A loss of influence that was brewing. According to Bloomberg, Tim Cook’s confidence in Giannandrea was shaken after the numerous delays in the development of the Apple Intelligence features promised during WWDC 2024. In a meeting with his team, the executive admitted that the delays were “ugly.” After the change of leadership in 2025, much of his functions began to be handled by other managers, while he maintained other tasks in AI and robotics technology research. Amar Subramanya’s arrival. Apple has brought in Amar Subramanya as Vice President of AI after his time as Corporate Vice President of AI at Microsoft and 16 years at Google, where he was responsible for engineering the Gemini assistant. According to the official note, Subramanya will take charge of key areas such as Apple Foundation Models, research in machine learning, and the AI Safety and Evaluation teams. He will report directly to Craig Federighi, thus reinforcing his weight in the artificial intelligence strategy. The rest of the organization linked to this area will be under the supervision of Sabih Khan and Eddy Cue, a distribution that seeks to align responsibilities with their respective departments.