Inside the Apple AI Restructuring: Vision Pro Head Rockwell Steps in to Rescue the Siri Team with an Iron Fist

According to Beating's monitoring, in early 2025, an emergency closed-door meeting of executives was held in a conference room next to Apple's software engineering department, without CEO Tim Cook in attendance. Due to the dismal market response to the first-generation Apple Intelligence, a key restructuring of Siri was facing delays, and competitors like Google and OpenAI were racing ahead. Executive Eddy Cue even warned internally that "AI could disrupt the iPhone business within ten years." At that time, Cook had lost confidence in then-AI head John Giannandrea, and the other executives decided to bypass the head and discuss solutions directly with Cook, submitting suggestions. The meeting not only prompted Cook to break his long-standing "hands-off" style and begin to personally intervene and fine-tune the details of AI development, but also initiated a comprehensive self-rescue and restructuring of Apple's AI business. During the meeting, Mike Rockwell, who had just finished leading the development of Vision Pro, stepped forward and volunteered to be the "AI firefighter." Rockwell wanted 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 AI business should not be separated from its department. Although Rockwell initially wanted to back out because he felt Federighi lacked a sense of urgency, he ultimately accepted the compromise and became the head of Siri, reporting to Federighi. After taking office, Rockwell quickly purged the original Siri leadership, brought in the core members of Vision Pro, and faced reality on the technology roadmap: realizing that the self-developed model was lagging behind the industry level, Rockwell, together with Federighi and Cook, reached an agreement with competitor Google to directly use Google's Gemini model and Google Cloud technology to support the operation of the new Siri. The self-rescue solution of introducing external models will make its debut at WWDC 2026. Apple will release a standalone Siri app to compete with ChatGPT and generative photo editing features, completely overturning the previous attitude of the senior management against chatbots and generative photo editing. WWDC 2026 is also Cook's final battle before officially stepping down on September 1st and handing the reins to new CEO John Ternus. The success or failure of the new Siri will not only affect the evaluation of Cook's career, but also directly relate to the future of the Ternus era. Constrained by the bottleneck of underlying AI technology, hardware such as desktop robots (delayed to 2028), smart screens (delayed to the end of 2026), and AI glasses (delayed to the end of 2027) have all been forced to be delayed. The results of the restructuring will determine whether Apple can regain the dominance of the next generation of computing.