Apple Inc. is facing its most significant artificial intelligence crisis to date, with promised upgrades to its Siri assistant delayed until 2026 and a rare executive shake-up signaling deep-seated problems in the company’s approach to AI development.
The tech giant confirmed Friday that features that would supercharge Siri with the ability to work with other apps have been postponed by at least a year. These capabilities, which Apple showcased last summer showing Siri juggling multiple apps to help users plan their day, represented the cornerstone of the company’s AI strategy.
“We’ve also been working on a more personalized Siri, giving it more awareness of your personal context, as well as the ability to take action for you within and across your apps,” an Apple representative said in a statement. “It’s going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features and we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year.”
The delay has prompted CEO Tim Cook to make a dramatic leadership change. Mike Rockwell, the executive who led Apple’s Vision Pro development, has been placed in charge of Siri, reporting directly to software chief Craig Federighi. The move effectively removes the voice assistant from the control of John Giannandrea, Apple’s head of AI who was poached from Google in 2018 specifically to transform the company into an AI powerhouse.
Robby Walker, who serves as a senior director at Apple, delivered the stark comments during an all-hands meeting for the Siri division, saying that the team was facing a bad period. Walker characterized the delays as “ugly and embarrassing,” according to people familiar with the gathering, adding that the decision to publicly promote features before they were ready had made matters worse.
The turmoil comes at a critical juncture for Apple. Rivals including Google, Amazon, and Microsoft have all made significant strides in integrating advanced AI capabilities into their products. Amazon last month rolled out an AI-driven overhaul of its Alexa assistant, while Google has been steadily improving its Gemini assistant.
Industry observers have been particularly critical of Apple’s missteps. “The fiasco here is not that Apple is late on AI,” wrote technology analyst John Gruber on his influential Daring Fireball blog. “The fiasco is that Apple pitched a story that wasn’t true, one that some people within the company surely understood wasn’t true, and they set a course based on that.”
The problems appear to stem from multiple factors within Apple’s corporate structure. According to Bloomberg reporting, Federighi, Apple’s software chief, remained reluctant to make large investments in AI—he didn’t see it as a core capability for personal computers or mobile devices. This resistance persisted even as competitors were making AI central to their strategies.
Giannandrea, for his part, has been criticized for a management style that some insiders say was insufficiently aggressive for Apple’s competitive culture. “Every other team at Apple, at least in engineering, is balls-to-the-wall, get it out, get it out on time, and JG’s team just doesn’t operate that way,” one executive told Bloomberg.
The company’s struggles have not gone unnoticed by investors, though the stock has remained relatively stable. Gene Munster, an influential analyst at Deepwater Asset Management, argues that Apple still has time to get its AI strategy right, pointing to customer loyalty driven by the ecosystem of Apple devices.
“I estimate the average Apple customer has 1.7 devices,” Munster noted. “The combination of those two factors makes Apple customers extremely loyal.”
Looking ahead, Apple appears to be taking a more pragmatic approach to AI development. Federighi has instructed Siri engineers to do “whatever it takes to build the best AI features,” even if that means using open-source models from other companies rather than relying solely on Apple’s own technology.
The company has also expanded its partnerships, working with OpenAI for ChatGPT integration and reportedly exploring collaborations with Google and Anthropic for various AI initiatives.
At the upcoming Worldwide Developers Conference next week, expectations for major AI announcements have been significantly tempered. Apple, a year after debuting its AI platform, will do little at WWDC to show it’s catching up to leaders like OpenAI and Google, according to Bloomberg’s preview of the event.
The delay of Siri’s transformation represents more than just a setback for a single product. The features that are delayed, meanwhile, are the ones that generated the most excitement during last year’s demo, including Siri’s ability to understand personal relationships and context while retrieving information across multiple apps.
For a company that built its reputation on delivering polished, fully-realized products, the very public stumbles with AI represent a significant departure from Apple’s traditional approach. As one technology columnist noted, “In a rush to please shareholders, Apple made a rare stumble.”
Whether Apple can recover from this setback remains to be seen. With rivals continuing to advance their AI capabilities at a rapid pace, the pressure on Cook and his newly restructured AI team to deliver something transformative has never been greater. The coming months will reveal whether Apple’s famous ability to enter markets late but with superior products can extend to the fast-moving world of artificial intelligence.
