Tim Cook’s legacy: a successful CEO who stumbled over AI

Apple’s Tim Cook was viewed as a worthy successor to Steve Jobs when he took over as CEO in August 2011, two months before Jobs’ death. 

Apple products became successful (and profitable) in many ways due to his success as COO, where he whipped company operations and supply chains into shape. Cook expanded the company’s product portfolio into new devices such as the Vision Pro and Apple Watch, rolled out a plethora of profitable services, and cut off failed projects like the rumored Apple car.

But Cook, who announced this week he will step down as CEO on Sept. 1 to become executive chairman, has one major blemish on his legacy. He missed perhaps one of the most important moments in computing history — the AI revolution. 

Apple could still win AI war, and it now falls on incoming CEO John Ternus, formerly Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering, to play catch-up with AI rivals Google, Microsoft and OpenAI. 

When ChatGPT took the world by storm in late 2022, Apple was years behind in the AI race and had to scramble to catch up. Cook’s failure is mostly attributable to Apple believing it could always go it alone when it comes to technology, said Jack Gold, principal analyst at J. Gold Associates

“They have a bias to doing everything in house,” Gold said.

The company did not believe in AI until ChatGPT emerged to take the tech industry by storm, according to a 2025 Bloomberg news report, and Cook did not provide the resources needed in-house to develop an AI-powered Siri. Apple was forced in early 2025 to look at partnering with Anthropic and OpenAI to push Siri into the AI era; in finally settled on working with Google’s Gemini.

The stumble was even more apparent since Apple was onto the AI trend early on, when it introduced neural chips for AI in iPhones as early as 2017. (Qualcomm introduced AI chips in its smartphone chips around the same time.)

At the time, the neural engine was hailed as a revolutionary development for developers to plug AI into applications. Apple wanted to use the neural chip’s matrix computing features to accelerate image and video processing, and users loved the results. 

Then in 2024, Apple introduced Apple Intelligence to much fanfare, hoping to bring AI technology across its devices and platforms. The AI layer was based on homegrown foundation models. 

Though it arrived nearly two years after ChatGPT, Apple Intelligence at the time offered truly innovative features. It had better OS and app integration and privacy features that kept user data secure — in part because of Private Cloud Compute. Other AI providers at the time were harvesting user data to improve their AI models.

Behind the scenes, however, Apple leadership and technological challenges slowed the development of Apple Intelligence. Apple in 2018 had hired former Google executive John Giannandrea to bring AI to Apple products. Giannandrea’s leadership was largely seen as ineffective and he retired last December. In early 2026, Apple turned to former Microsoft AI leader Amar Subramanya to lead the company’s AI efforts.

As a result, many of the main Apple Intelligence features were delayed, with hopes they  would finally arrive in 2026.

Then in January came the partnership with Google: “The next generation of Apple Foundation Models will be based on Google’s Gemini models and cloud technology,” the companies said in a joint statement.

Incoming Apple CEO John Ternus and current CEO Tim Cook.Apple

Now, the work for Apple’s soon-to-be CEO Ternus is clear: bring the company fully into  the AI age. “Unlike previous market inflections and transitions, Apple can’t afford to come in late to the party this time around,” said Jim McGregor, principal analyst at Tirias Research.

With its experience in devices and talent, Apple is well equipped to build AI into a personal experience, McGregor said. “Apple has to chart a path to reinvent the personal experience, which will drastically change devices and how we use them,” he said.

To succeed, Ternus will have to look at more partnerships and drop Apple’s reliance on in-house development, analysts said.

“When AI is moving at such a fast pace, no one company like Apple can really move fast enough to keep up,” Gold said.

The Google partnership is a solid step in that direction, as finding the expertise to hire the right people is a major hurdle, given the compensation package that others are offering, Gold said.

Whether the company has finally righted the AI ship should become clear in a little over a month at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference — the last one of the Cook era.Tim Cook’s legacy: a successful CEO who stumbled over AI – ComputerworldRead More