New Siri lead Mike Rockwell is overhauling the Siri management team in order to step up development on Apple Intelligence features, reports Bloomberg. He is demoting or replacing the managers who previously worked on Siri after the Apple Intelligence features demonstrated at WWDC 2024 failed to launch as expected.
Rockwell, who worked on the Vision Pro software, took over the Siri team in March, with former Siri chief John Giannandrea being reassigned to artificial intelligence research. Rockwell is replacing Siri managers with members of the Vision Pro software group, while also restructuring Siri teams that handle speech, understanding, performance, and user experience.
Longtime Vision Pro engineering lead Ranjit Desai will oversee Siri engineering, including the platform and systems groups. Vision Pro senior director Olivier Gutknecht will lead the team that designs the Siri user experience, and Vision Pro engineering director Nate Begeman and Core OS senior director Tom Duffy will work on Siri's underlying architecture.
Employees were told that the management overhaul would help Apple reach its Siri development goals, as the additions to the team are considered some of Apple's top software engineering talent, according to Bloomberg.
Rockwell is still overseeing the development of visionOS while he works on Siri, while the Vision Pro hardware team continues to report to John Ternus. Teams that were led by the executives moving to the Siri team will be overseen by Geoff Stahl, who has worked for Rockwell for years.
Under Rockwell's lead, Apple is rearchitecting Siri to use an LLM-based system that will streamline the personal assistant's underlying technology and outward-facing capabilities. To ensure that Siri's planned functionality for integrating more extensively with apps is ready to go on time, Apple plans to work with third-party app developers.
