Apple is reshuffling its top deck of executives amid concerns that the iPhone-maker is struggling to bring its flagship generative AI features to market. Apple CEO Tim Cook has tapped Mike Rockwell, the vice president of the Vision Products Group, to replace John Giannandrea, who headed the Siri team so far, according to a report by Bloomberg. Cook reportedly made the change in leadership after losing confidence in Giannandrea “to execute on product development.” Rockwell, the new AI head, will report to Craig Federighi, the senior vice president of software engineering at Apple. Meanwhile, Rockwell’s former position as head of the team behind Vision Pro will now be taken up by Paul Meade, who used to be in charge of hardware engineering for the company’s AR/VR headset. Apple has largely attempted to keep up with the rapid development and consumer expectations of AI by integrating third-party services like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Its own personalised AI offering broadly known as Apple Intelligence has hit a couple of snags since its rollout. For instance, users reportedly pointed out that the AI revamped version of Siri struggled to answer simple questions like “who won the Super Bowl?” At the start of the year, the BBC had flagged to Apple that its AI summary feature contained factual errors that were incorrectly attributed to the British broadcaster. In a sign of mounting troubles, Apple has also been hit with a lawsuit filed in a US district court on March 19, that alleges false advertising of several Apple Intelligence features. The lawsuit comes weeks after the company announced that its planned AI improvements to Siri will be delayed until 2026.
