By Adam Levine

On Monday, Apple announced the retirement of John Giannandrea, the company's Senior Vice President Machine Learning and AI Strategy. It marks another shake-up of Apple's AI team this year as it struggles to find its footing in a post-ChatGPT world.

Apple was already using machine learning widely throughout its products when it hired Giannandrea in 2018 after a stint at Google, where he led the integration of AI into Google's most important products like Search. All of Apple's AI research was under his purview.

But the poor reception of Apple Intelligence, with the biggest feature, a much-improved Siri, still not released, has led to a shake-up. There were reports in the spring that many of Giannandrea's responsibilities, including Siri, were reassigned to other executives. The retirement marks a further splintering of Apple's AI efforts, with more of Giannandrea's portfolio getting spread out through Apple's organization.

Giannandrea's replacement, Amar Subramanya, will have a much slimmer set of responsibilities at Apple, and report to Senior Vice President Software Engineering, Craig Federighi. Giannandrea had reported directly to CEO Tim Cook. Subramanya was most recently a vice president at Microsoft.

"We are thankful for the role John played in building and advancing our AI work, helping Apple continue to innovate and enrich the lives of our users," said Cook in a press release. "AI has long been central to Apple's strategy, and we are pleased to welcome Amar to Craig's leadership team and to bring his extraordinary AI expertise to Apple."

Organizational structure hasn't been the only source of churn for Apple's AI efforts this year. It's also lost several high-profile researchers to Meta and OpenAI.

Write to Adam Levine at adam.levine@barrons.com

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December 01, 2025 18:42 ET (23:42 GMT)

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