Apple‘s senior director overseeing Siri, Robby Walker, told staff that delays to key artificial intelligence features have been “ugly” and “embarrassing,” revealing the extent of the company’s AI crisis during a recent all-hands meeting, according to Bloomberg.
Walker acknowledged that the company’s decision to promote the technology before it was ready had worsened the situation. “This was not one of these situations where we get to show people our plan after it’s done. We showed people before,” he said, as reported by Mark Gurman of Bloomberg.
The delayed features, which would allow Siri to tap into users’ personal data and better respond to queries, were unveiled last June at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference. Despite being heavily marketed as a key selling point for the iPhone 16, the company revealed last week that these enhancements would be postponed indefinitely.
According to Walker, the technology only works properly up to “two-thirds to 80% of the time,” meaning it fails every one out of three attempts. Apple executives decided this performance wasn’t reliable enough for public release.
“We have other commitments across Apple to other projects,” Walker told his team, adding that those commitments are “potentially more timeline-urgent than the features that have been deferred.” Bloomberg reports that while Apple is targeting iOS 19 for these features, Walker cautioned this “doesn’t mean that we’re shipping then.”
The meeting revealed possible tension between Apple’s Siri division and its marketing department. “To make matters worse,” Walker said, “Apple’s marketing communications department wanted to promote the enhancements” despite their unready state. The company has since pulled an iPhone 16 advertisement highlighting these features from YouTube.
Walker empathized with team members feeling “angry, disappointed, burned out and embarrassed” by the postponement, Gurman reported. Nevertheless, he praised the team’s work as “incredibly impressive” and vowed that Apple will eventually “ship the world’s greatest virtual assistant.”
While no executives are expected to be immediately fired over the AI crisis, Bloomberg reports that Apple is making management adjustments, including moving more senior executives under AI head John Giannandrea and enlisting veteran executive Kim Vorrath to help fix the company’s AI efforts.
