Inside the Major Reorganization of Apple AI: Vision Pro Head Roeloff Cross-Industry Rescue, Ruthless Purge of the Siri Team

According to Beating Monitoring, in early 2025, an emergency closed-door meeting of executives was convened in a conference room next to Apple’s Software Engineering Department, with CEO Tim Cook not in attendance. Due to the poor market response to the first-generation Apple Intelligence, the key overhaul of Siri was postponed, and rivals such as Google and OpenAI were racing at full speed. In internal discussions, executive Eddy Cue even warned that “AI could upend the iPhone business within the next decade.” At that time, Cook had already lost confidence in the then–AI head, John Giannandrea, and the other executives decided to go around the head and discuss the plan directly with Cook, submitting their recommendations to him.

The meeting not only pushed Cook to break his long-standing “hands-off” style—starting personally to deeply involve himself in and fine-tune the details of AI development—but also kicked off Apple’s comprehensive self-rescue and restructuring of its AI business.

During the meeting, Mike Rockwell, who had just led the development of Vision Pro, stepped forward and volunteered to serve as the “AI firefighting team member.” Rockwell hoped to report directly to Cook and be promoted to senior vice president, while software chief Craig Federighi firmly defended control of the Software Engineering Department, insisting that the AI business must not be separated from his department. Although Rockwell initially considered backing out because he believed Federighi lacked urgency, he ultimately accepted a compromise and took the role of Siri head reporting to Federighi.

After taking office, Rockwell quickly removed the existing Siri leadership team, brought in the core talent from Vision Pro, and faced the technical reality on the roadmap: realizing that in-house models were lagging behind industry levels. Rockwell, together with Federighi, Cue, and the competitor Google, reached an agreement to directly use Google Gemini models and Google Cloud technology to support the operation of the new Siri.

The self-rescue plan that brings in external models is set to debut at WWDC 2026. Apple will roll out an independent Siri app to match ChatGPT and a set of generative photo editing capabilities, completely overturning the executives’ previous stance of rejecting chatbots and generative retouching. WWDC 2026 will also be the final act before Cook officially steps down on September 1 and hands the baton to the new CEO, John Ternus. The success or failure of the new Siri will not only affect how Cook’s career is judged, but also directly determine Ternus’s prospects.

Constrained by underlying AI technology bottlenecks, hardware such as desktop robots (pushed back to 2028), smart screens (pushed back to the end of 2026), and AI glasses (pushed back to the end of 2027) has been forced to be delayed across the board. The outcomes of the restructuring will decide whether Apple can reclaim dominance in the next era of computing.