According to the latest HR news, Bill Stasior, the former head of Apple’s Siri division is all set to join its competitor- Microsoft. After working with Apple for more than seven years, Stasior is now appointed as the Corporate Vice President of Technology and will report to Chief Technology Officer, Kevin Scott.
Stasior announced his job change by updating his resume on his personal website. As mentioned in his resume, he was the vice president for AI and Siri when he left in May. According to his LinkedIn profile, during his seven-year tenure at Apple, he headed the 11,000-strong team of developers, scientists, product managers and designers working on Siri.
Why did the Chief move on from Siri to Cortana?
According to sources, Stasior’s departure seems less about the current state of Siri and more a reflection of the reality of Artifical Intelligence at Apple. Just last year, this company poached John Giannandrea from Google, where he was a former head of search and AI. Owing to this addition, the way Apple works on AI has changed massively.
Considering Siri had fallen far behind Google Assistant and Amazon’s Alexa in sophistication and industry adoption, Giannandrea was hired to revamp its AI efforts. After Giannandrea took a more hands-on role in the Siri division, he was promoted as the Senior Vice President in December. Thanks to this, he was reporting directly to CEO Tim Cook. Plus, he was responsible for all machine learning and general AI projects at Apple. Sources claim that this promotion resulted in Stasior walking away from day-to-day duties running the Siri team.
What’s in store for Apple’s former Siri Chief?
It seems evident that Stasior will lead and work on improving Microsoft’s voice assistant, Cortana; which is ignored lately and even removed from a few products. However, sources claim that the new vice president is expected to lead an AI group.
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