Has Apple’s Siri learned there is no ‘I’ in team?

Apple Intelligence might already have become a slightly tarnished brand — a modern-day repeat of the Apple Maps mess — but the company won’t give up on it without a fight; the word’s out that it now intends to rollout the contextual Siri features it promised at WWDC 2024 this fall. If it achieves this, it does at least mean the company will manage to ship the feature within the same year it promised, even if it did have to change senior leadership to get there.

A fall release also means the feature is likely to be part of what is promised with iOS 19, which is also expected to appear later this year after introduction at the upcoming Worldwide Developers Conference in June. That expected update to the iPhone’s operating system is already being touted as the biggest iOS upgrade in a while — a claim that hints at even greater intentions for 2026, which should see new iPhone designs, new product categories, and important new services (including AI-assisted healthcare services). 

AI on the prize

While we recently heard Apple intends to open up the platform to support Google Gemini and others along with ChatGPT, many of these plans will have been made with Apple Intelligence in mind. That contextual ability is what I I expect will bond all those and any subsequent hardware introductions together, and I can imagine that many at the company are frustrated that promises made at WWDC have not (yet) been kept.

That’s particularly true since it emerged that most of the people working on Siri development at that time had never seen those things before, even in the labs. Quite clearly, there was some hype over substance. And while Apple appears to be working hard to push those promised Apple Intelligence features over the line, there’s little doubt some of these challenges reflected internal conflicts that might still need to be resolved.

The New York Times says Apple plans to release a Siri virtual assistant this fall that can handle certain transactions, such as editing and sending photos to friends. These were among the still unreleased features demonstrated at WWDC 2024, which suggests other tasks could also be on the way, such as finding emails on specific topics, or files shared with a user by another person in preceding week.  

Apple is said to be ready to do “whatever it takes” to bring these exciting Apple Intelligence tools across the line. It might well have to do more.

Putting an ‘I’ in ‘team’

These reports follows insights from The Information that exposed some of the big fissures running through Apple Intelligence development, describing a team sometimes in conflict with weak leadership and shifting goals. Apple’s teams apparently often shifted focus between on-device and in-cloud genAI services and frequently got lost exploring one direction only to shift to another. More recently, we learned that R&D spending decisions were made, unmade, and that development then suffered in reaction to divergent voices at the top of the company.

(Apple’s AI leader, John Giannandrea, had secured a hefty budget for AI servers in 2023, only to see that budget slashed by another department leader, for example.)

What seems to be emerging is a picture of significant internal conflict at Apple with different departments and leaders getting into turf wars that look – at least from here – humdrum and petty rather than being focused on the big picture around Siri. That concerns me, as this kind of in-fighting frequently characterizes groups at the end of their growth. 

The power of teams

There is one more thing.

A few weeks ago, we learned of changes in leadership for Apple Intelligence. That news emerged subsequent to Apple’s top 100 leaders meeting, an annual event usually held in secrecy. As John Gruber noted at that time, the fact that this news emerged after that meeting means at least two of Apple’s most senior people leaked it, which itself hints at conflict between leading decision makers within the company.

To my mind, the Apple Intelligence story shows a need for Apple’s senior leaders to bring their key people into harmony, as in-fighting erodes trust within any company, and entities characterized by lack of trust do not field the most effective teams. Everything around us might have been made up by people no smarter than we are, but they probably didn’t make these things up alone — they worked as a team. You don’t need AI, generative, or otherwise, to see that.

You can follow me on social media! Join me on BlueSky,  LinkedIn, and Mastodon.