Summary: Mike Rockwell, the newly appointed leader of the Siri department at Apple, has made some major changes to the department. These changes involve demoting some leaders and outright replacing others in order to speed up the production of Apple’s AI.
Several of the biggest tech companies in the world have fully embraced the generative AI life. However, that’s not the case for Apple, as the company still has the DUNCE cap firmly planted on Siri’s head. Nearly a year after the company unveiled Apple Intelligence, all we’ve gotten so far is a notification summarization tool (that doesn’t work all the time) and a Magic Eraser clone.
That’s a far cry from the heavily integrated and intelligent Siri that the company showed off during WWDC 2024. The iOS 18-equipped iPhone 16 was supposed to be the hyper-intelligent phone to throw punches at Pixel 9 with Gemini and the Galaxy S25 with Galaxy AI. Instead, it delivered an iPhone 15 wrapped in an iPhone 14 Pro’s body.
Mike Rockwell is making some major changes to the Siri dapartment’s leadership
Users are getting pretty anxious about Apple’s constant delays with AI. They were promised the sun, but they were given a bottle of Sunkist. As such, Apple is putting additional pressure on the Siri team to get stuff done. The company recently replaced the previous Siri boss with Mike Rockwell, the former leader of the Vision Pro division.
We knew that changes were going to come with this shakeup, but we didn’t expect it to be on this scale. Rockwell has taken a sledgehammer leadership roles in the department. “He’s also restructuring teams related to speech, understanding, performance and user experience, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the changes are private,” stated Apple Insider Mark Gurman.
Several of the leaders on the team were replaced with personnel from the Vision Pro division. For example, Rockwell appointed Olivier Gutknecht, a senior Vision Pro software executive, to lead the Siri user experience. Also, he appointed Ranjit Desai, a Vision Pro development deputy to lead much of Siri’s engineering.
Apple Veterans Nate Begeman and Tom Duffy will run underlying architecture in the department, Stuart Bowers will work on “Siri’s ability to figure out how to respond to a user,” and Siri leader David Winarsky will lead a new group that will handle voice and speech-related features. So, these changes see Mike Rockwell demoting or outright replacing previous roles.
Apple is serious
This move lets us know that Apple is serious about revolutionizing Siri. People have been waiting ever since last year to see the promised features. We’ll have to see if this switch-up in leadership will help kick things into high gear.
2025-04-23 15:09:40