According to MacRumors, Apple updated its executive leadership page to remove John Giannandrea, who is set to retire in spring 2025. The company announced his departure earlier this week, with former Microsoft AI VP Amar Subramanya taking over as vice president of AI. Subramanya will report to software chief Craig Federighi, but isn’t yet listed on the site. Some of Giannandrea’s teams, including AI Infrastructure and Search and Knowledge, are being shifted to executives Sabih Khan and Eddy Cue. Giannandrea joined Apple in 2018 from Google, overseeing Siri and Core ML. His removal from the page comes just days after Apple confirmed his retirement and follows the company stripping him of the Siri team in March 2024.
The Siri failure was the final straw
Here’s the thing: this retirement is anything but a quiet, planned exit. It’s a direct consequence of the embarrassing and public failure of the “Apple Intelligence” Siri overhaul. Remember at WWDC? Apple demoed this smarter Siri, used it to market the iPhone 16, and then… nothing. Come spring 2025, they had to announce a year-long delay. That’s a massive product and marketing miss. So it’s no shock that by March, Apple had already taken Siri away from Giannandrea and overhauled the team. They removed him from the robotics division in April, too. Basically, his responsibilities were being carved up months before the official “retirement” news.
A culture of indecision and conflict
The report from The Information is damning. More than half a dozen former employees pointed to poor leadership, conflicting personalities, and just plain indecision as core problems. And you have to wonder: how much did Apple’s famous—some would say infamous—focus on privacy hamstring development? It’s a classic trade-off. Stringent on-device processing is great for security but can limit the raw power and speed of iteration you get with cloud-based AI. Was the team stuck in a loop, unable to decide on a direction that balanced capability with Apple’s privacy dogma? It seems like that internal conflict finally boiled over, and the delayed Siri was the breaking point.
What happens to Apple AI now?
So now Amar Subramanya from Microsoft steps in. It’s a clear signal Apple is looking for fresh, external leadership to untangle this mess. But the reorganization is telling. By splitting Giannandrea’s old domains between Federighi’s software engineering org, the operations-focused Sabih Khan, and services head Eddy Cue, Apple is decentralizing AI. It’s not one person’s vision anymore; it’s becoming a component embedded across different divisions. Is that a better structure? Maybe. It could integrate AI more deeply into products. But it also risks a return to the indecision and conflicting priorities that allegedly caused the problem in the first place. The pressure is on, and the clock is ticking toward that 2026 Siri relaunch.
