What you need to know
- Former Siri team leader Bill Stasior has joined Microsoft's AI team.
- He was previously at Apple for nearly seven years.
- He will now report directly to Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott.
Former Siri vice president Bill Stasior is joining Microsoft's AI team, according to a new report from The Information. Stasior was previously on Apple's Siri team for nearly seven years before departing back in January.
Stasior joined Apple back in 2012 as part of the fairly new Siri team. Over the course of his time with the team, Siri made vast improvements but was never able to reach its true potential. Eventually Apple's voice assistant was surpassed by Google Assistant and has trailed ever since, though the gap has closed recently.
It's unclear if the lack of traction in the voice assistant battles was the reason for Stasior's departure. He will now join Microsoft as corporate vice president of technology directly reporting to CTO Kevin Scott where "he will work to help align strategies across the company."
As the report notes, Stasior's new role with Microsoft continues to underscore the reshuffling among high ranking AI engineers at the big tech companies. After all, Stasior was replaced at Apple by a former Google leader, John Giannandrea.
That isn't surprising as the importance of AI becomes more dire for these companies. Considering the amount of data these companies handle, not having a streamlined and efficient AI team could mean falling far behind the competition.
