Apple is experiencing its most extensive leadership transformation since visionary CEO and cofounder Steve Jobs died in 2011, with a wave of departures across artificial intelligence, design, legal, operations, and financial divisions that will reshape one of the world’s most valuable companies.
The iPhone maker announced last week that Lisa Jackson, its vice president of environment, policy, and social initiatives, will retire in January, while Kate Adams, who has served as general counsel since 2017, will retire late next year. These departures follow a cascade of recent exits including that of AI chief John Giannandrea, who announced his retirement this month, and Alan Dye, the head of user interface design since 2015, who left to join Meta. Bloomberg also reported that Johny Srouji, Apple’s chief chip architect for Apple silicon, is mulling an exit, but the 61-year-old executive threw cold water on those rumors Monday, saying: “I love my team, I love my job at Apple,” in a memo to staffers.
Speaking of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg’s social media empire has been the beneficiary of Apple’s exodus. Billy Sorrentino, another senior design director, chose to leave for Meta with Dye, and Ruoming Pang, who headed Apple’s AI foundation models team, also left for Meta in July, taking approximately 100 engineers with him. Ke Yang, who led AI-driven web search for Siri, and Jian Zhang, Apple’s AI robotics lead, also left for Meta this year.
