Apple shakes up the Siri team

Just a few days ago, when writing about Apple’s announcement that promised Siri features would be delayed, I mused about whether Apple had the right personnel in place:

…is [John] Giannandrea the guy? Without knowing everything he’s accomplished (since Apple doesn’t talk about the performance of individual senior vice presidents), it’s certainly easy to put the blame on him for the lack of meaningful Siri improvements since he arrived. Maybe it’s time to make a big change there.

On Thursday, Mark Gurman wrote the following at Bloomberg:

Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook has lost confidence in the ability of AI head John Giannandrea to execute on product development, so he’s moving over another top executive to help: Vision Pro creator Mike Rockwell. In a new role, Rockwell will be in charge of the Siri virtual assistant, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the moves haven’t been announced.

In recent days, Siri (which has rarely had good press in the last several years) has been under increased scrutiny. Not just because of the aforementioned Siri features delays, but even in its failure to handle even a query as basic as, “What month is it?” So I consider it welcome news that Siri will be in the hands of a new product manager. When you see the rapid progress made by ChatGPT, Grok, and other LLMs with voice assistants, it’s really inexcusable that a company as large and well-respected as Apple has allowed Siri to be lapped as it has been.

Here’s one thing I hope Mike Rockwell will be permitted to do: release iterative improvements to Siri throughout the year rather than waiting for WWDC. As an enterprise Apple admin, I appreciate the stability of Apple’s yearly release cycle, but I think in some ways it handcuffs Apple’s ability to move faster in the areas of software development where that makes sense. With Apple Intelligence, Apple was forced to be more iterative since it’s clearly in catch-up mode. “Move fast and break things” isn’t really in Apple’s DNA, but it is more representative of the pace of AI improvements in the industry.

Apple made a big move this week. Let’s hope the payoffs for that move come sooner rather than later.

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