The quiet Apple executive behind company’s AI strategy

Apple lags behind in artificial intelligence.

Now, the company is preparing to launch its first wave of user-facing AI products. And driving that effort is John Giannandrea, a Silicon Valley veteran and Apple’s top executive in charge of AI strategy.

On Monday, Apple will hold its annual developers conference, WWDC, where it is expected to show customers and investors its take on generative AI across products such as the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, which is the result of Giannandrea’s efforts.

Apple faces enormous pressure to deliver an impressive slate of AI products and services. In interviews with CNBC, several people who know and have worked with Giannandrea over the years describe him as a humble and forward-thinking technologist, a trait that could be critical to Apple catching up in AI.

Siri, Apple’s digital assistant, is a hot mess that struggles to answer even the most basic questions. Apple does not sell AI chatbots, unlike Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic. It does not sell powerful chips to cloud companies running AI services, unlike Nvidia. Apple’s stock has lagged while its peers’ shares have skyrocketed this year on the promise of AI. The stock is up only 1% this year, while Nvidia, which surpassed Apple in market value Wednesday, is up 144%. In January, Apple lost its position as the world’s most valuable public company to Microsoft, another leader in artificial intelligence.

Apple declined to comment.

Wall Street sees this as an opportunity for Apple to demonstrate that it is not behind in AI, acting as a catalyst for the stock throughout the second half of the year and sparking a hot upgrade cycle for the next iPhone model.

“We believe that AI features, combined with other Apple ecosystem investments and hardware upgrades for iPhone 16, has the potential to drive upside to product estimates by increasing upgrade rates,” Morgan Stanley analysts wrote in a note to investors this week.

Now it is up to Giannandrea and his team to meet those expectations.

As the tech world became increasingly obsessed with AI over the last 18 months, Apple began to open up about how AI powers product features and development.

“We view AI and [machine learning] as fundamental, core technologies, and they are virtually embedded in every product that we build,” Apple CEO Tim Cook told CNBC in August 2023.

Until now, Giannandrea’s team has focused on AI features that run in the background on Apple devices and software. This includes features like an accessibility feature that can digitally mimic someone’s voice if they are unable to speak for themselves, as well as automatic edits that improve the appearance of your iPhone photos.

According to Apple, the company has been using artificial intelligence (AI) to power what you do on your Apple devices for many years without your knowledge. According to a Bloomberg report last week, this is expected to lead to more user-facing features this year, including Siri improvements, a partnership with OpenAI that will incorporate the ChatGPT-maker’s technology into the iPhone’s software, and sophisticated voice controls for its apps.

People who have worked with Giannandrea over the years and spoke with CNBC describe him as a humble, mild-mannered technologist who does not seek attention like more flashy Silicon Valley executives do.

His most notable start was at a company called General Magic, which spun off from Apple in the early 1990s and began producing software for PDAs, the forerunners of modern smartphones. Late in the decade, he cofounded TellMe, a company that created a voice-activated online information service.

Anthony Accardi, a TellMe cofounder, said Giannandrea was always ahead of his time, working on technology like running software in the cloud many years before it became the norm.

“He has the foresight to recognize this is an inevitability and direction we’re going in the future,” Accardi stated.

Giannandrea, also known as “JG,” joined Google after it acquired Metaweb, another startup he cofounded.

Geoffrey Hinton, one of the “godfathers” of AI, collaborated with Giannandrea at Google. According to Hinton, Giannandrea possessed a unique skill set among tech executives in that he was an excellent researcher as well as a manager. Hinton cited Google’s generative AI breakthrough from last decade: the ability to automatically caption images using AI.

“He really understood the importance of it,” Hinton said.

By 2018, Giannandrea was in charge of AI at Google, and Apple’s hiring of him was viewed as a major coup. Within eight months, he was promoted to Apple’s leadership team, where he reports directly to Cook alongside other top executives such as Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams and Eddy Cue, who oversees services. It was the clearest indication yet that Apple was taking AI seriously, particularly for future projects such as its now-defunct self-driving car project.

So why abandon Google, the perceived AI leader at the time, for Apple? According to one person who spoke with Giannandrea recently, he disliked how Google’s leadership struggled to make and execute decisions, instead treating parts of the business as a skunkworks research lab. He discovered the opposite at Apple: leadership makes a decision, and the rest of the company rallies behind it to make it a reality.

. However, in the six years since joining Apple, Giannandrea has not been as visible to the public as his peers on the company’s leadership team, who frequently showcase the company’s latest products and updates in flashy promotional videos littered with slick edits and dad jokes. Nonetheless, his many years of experience and expertise have earned him widespread respect from other Silicon Valley leaders.

Emil Michael, a former Uber executive and co-founder of TellMe, still seeks advice from Giannandrea.

Outside of Apple, Giannandrea serves on the board of SETI, a nonprofit organization founded in 1984 to detect radio signals from potentially intelligent life in the universe. In recent years, he co-founded a data center business with his wife, which he eventually sold, adding to his list of successful exits from tech companies.

Giannandrea is an active and engaged board member at SETI, and he even contributed money to a new project called COSMIC, which uses powerful computers to analyze radio signals from space, according to SETI CEO Bill Diamond. According to Diamond, Giannandrea served on a SETI review committee, providing feedback on research plans for planetary defenses against asteroids.

“He’s got a very scientific mind, an engineering mind,” Diamond stated. “The question about life beyond Earth fascinates him.”

Some people who know Giannandrea told CNBC that they would be surprised if he appeared during Apple’s WWDC keynote on Monday, rather than delegating the spotlight to members of his team or Craig Federighi, Apple’s head of software.

“JG is not a showman,” one person who knows him well told CNBC. “That’s not his vibe.”


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