Inside Apple’s AI shake-up
AI’s next frontier
Inside Apple’s AI shake-up
AI’s next frontier
CEO of Glassdoor and Indeed - AI is not replacing workers
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Inside Apple’s AI shake-up
In June 2025, I reported on a major inflection point inside Apple Inc. After a disappointing launch of the Apple Intelligence platform and delays to a new Siri digital assistant, software chief Craig Federighi and other executives were seriously considering sidelining the company’s internal AI models in favor of a third-party provider. The story sent shockwaves through Apple’s foundation models team, which builds its underlying AI technology. Beyond the reputational sting, the report raised existential questions about the future of the group — and the jobs of its employees. Within hours of that story’s publication on June 30, Apple’s top AI leadership moved to contain the fallout.
Mike Rockwell, who oversees Siri, and John Giannandrea, then Apple’s head of AI, convened an emergency all-hands meeting with the foundation models team. The message from leadership was unequivocal: Apple wasn’t putting its own models on the back burner. Rockwell even dismissed the article as “bulls--t,” according to people in the meeting. Few in the room were persuaded. It was obvious that Apple Intelligence lagged behind rival platforms and that the Siri delay was deeply embarrassing. The company was at risk of missing the biggest technology shift since the internet, and seeking outside help made a lot of sense. Over the following months, the models group steadily lost talent — including its leader, Ruoming Pang.
At the time, the company was already in discussions with both Anthropic PBC and OpenAI about supplying models to rebuild Siri and power parts of Apple Intelligence. At the start, Google wasn’t considered a likely partner for this. The Alphabet Inc.-owned company wasn’t seen as the leading tech provider. By August, negotiations with Anthropic had stalled. The startup was seeking several billion dollars annually over multiple years, terms that weren’t favorable to Apple. And partnering with OpenAI posed its own problems: That company was actively poaching Apple engineers and pursuing its own hardware. That left Google....
Read the original on Bloomberg
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AI’s next frontier
The English engineer, Henry Mill, submitted the first-ever patent for a “machine transcribing letters” in 1714. It never actually went into production, but it was a forerunner of the typewriter and then the electronic keyboard: 312 years later, Christian Klein, CEO of software giant SAP, is noting the end of an era. “The end of the keyboard is near,” he tells me. “When you encounter voice recognition from many of these large language models, [it] is super strong. Now we have to do some work to translate voice into business language and business data.” SAP’s prediction that “data-inputting” via typing will end in the next two to three years at the firm has significance well beyond the death of QWERTY.
“The future will be, for sure, that you are not typing any data information into an SAP system. You can instead ask certain analytical questions with your voice. You can trigger operational task workflows. You can also make entries in the system with your voice—performance feedback, pipeline entries, et cetera. The technological capabilities are there, it really is now about the execution.”
He argues that there are two broad categories of businesses when it comes to AI adoption. First, the company that says, “AI is really changing the way I run my business.” Then the other that says, “I invested a ton of money, but I see rather low value in it.” The latter might be viewing AI as an efficiency hack for one division or function. The issue here is that there is no reach across to other parts of the firm.
He gives an example of a large consumer goods company SAP is working with which is beginning to link customer-demand planning with company financial planning and then with inventory control—a laborious, often monthslong process. “They said, ‘Okay, this agent really is predicting the demand much more intelligently than all the human beings I had in planning,’” he said. “‘But it still always takes months until I adjust the inventory—and the inventory is dependent on procurement and the manufacturing side.’ So we are now building, with agents, an end-to-end planning scenario which helps them optimize inventory by 20%. This is real money.”
Applying AI horizontally throughout the business, rather than vertically in divisions, is key. Add in training of your employees, and the transformational effects of AI can finally begin to be realized....
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CEO of Glassdoor and Indeed - AI is not replacing workers
Diane Brady talks to Recruit Holdings CEO about current hiring and firing trends. As CEO of Recruit Holdings, the $23 billion-a-year parent of Indeed and Glassdoor, among others, Hisayuki “Deko” Idekoba thinks a lot about global labor markets. Down in Europe; up everywhere else.
Only a small fraction of layoffs are directly attributed to AI so far. Yet perceptions among workers (especially Gen Z) are far more pessimistic, feeding distrust and “AI anxiety.” “People are screaming that AI is replacing people. That’s totally not true. We’re not seeing that kind of data at all,” he told me. (U.S. employment data and my conversations with other leaders reinforce that conclusion.) Tech layoffs are highly visible but represent a small share of total employment; he believes they reflect post‑pandemic over‑hiring more than AI‑driven job destruction.
Big changes are coming in terms of how leaders source and assess talent. AI is creating a host of new challenges for employers, from generating a tsunami of automated applications—often in the millions for Fortune 500 companies—to enabling applicants to hide deficits in writing, thinking and analysis because of LLMs. As a result, sites like Indeed are playing a bigger role in verifying qualified candidates to narrow the funnel, even doing basic background checks upfront and helping employers assess how the roles they’re hiring for are likely to evolve. “Your team is spending a crazy amount of time on this,” he said. “This year, I think CEOs will be a little more sophisticated about the ROI.”
His teams are designing AI agents to reach out to job seekers on behalf of employers on his platforms, to screen and interact with applicants. Not only does that ease the workload and cut costs for HR teams, it creates better interactions with applicants and hopefully more affection for the employer’s brand, even if they don’t end up getting hired….