Now, the company is getting ready to unleash its first wave of user-facing AI products. And behind that push is John Giannandrea, a Silicon Valley veteran who is Apple’s top executive in charge of AI strategy.
On Monday, Apple will hold its annual developers conference called WWDC, where it’s expected to show customers and investors its take on generative AI across products like the iPhone, iPad and Mac, the fruit of Giannandrea’s work.
There’s enormous pressure on Apple to deliver an impressive slate of AI products and services. In interviews with CNBC, several people who know and have worked with Giannandrea over the years depict him as a humble and ahead-of-the-curve technologist, a quality that could be essential to Apple catching up in AI.
Siri is a mess and struggles with even the most basic questions. Apple doesn’t sell a product like the AI chatbots being pushed out by Microsoft or startups OpenAI and Anthropic. It doesn’t sell powerful chips to cloud companies running AI services like Nvidia. Apple stock has lagged while shares of its peers have ballooned this year on the promise of AI. The stock is up just 1% this year, while Nvidia, which overtook Apple in market value on Wednesday, is up 144%. Apple also lost its spot as the most valuable public company in the world to another AI leader, Microsoft, in January.
Apple declined to comment.
Wall Street sees this as a moment for Apple to prove it’s not behind on AI, serving as a catalyst for the stock through the second half of the year and spurring a hot upgrade cycle for the next iPhone model.
“We believe that AI features, combined with other Apple ecosystem investments and hardware upgrades for iPhone 16, has the potential to drive upside to product estimates by increasing upgrade rates,” Morgan Stanley analysts wrote in a note to investors this week.
Now it’s up to Giannandrea and his team to match those expectations.
As the tech world became increasingly obsessed with AI over the last 18 months or so, Apple began to talk more openly about how AI powers product features and development.
“We view AI and [machine learning] as fundamental, core technologies, and they are virtually embedded in every product that we build,” Apple CEO Tim Cook told CNBC in August of 2023.
Until now, Giannandrea’s team has worked on AI features that run behind the scenes on Apple devices and software. That includes things like an accessibility feature that can digitally mimic someone’s voice if they lose the ability to speak themselves, or automatic edits that make your iPhone photos look better.
If you ask the folks at Apple, the company has been using AI for many years to power what you do on your Apple devices without you even knowing about it. That’s expected to evolve into more user-facing features this year, like improvements to the Siri digital assistant, a partnership with OpenAI that’ll add the ChatGPT-maker’s tech to the iPhone’s software and sophisticated voice controls for its apps, according to a Bloomberg report last week.
People who have worked with Giannandrea over the years who spoke to CNBC characterize him as a humble, mild-mannered technologist who doesn’t seek attention like more flashy Silicon Valley executives typically do.
His most notable start was at a company called General Magic, which spun out of Apple and began business in the early 1990s making software for PDAs, the predecessors to today’s modern smartphones. Late in that decade he cofounded TellMe, a startup that made a voice-activated, online information service.
A TellMe cofounder, Anthony Accardi, said Giannandrea always seemed ahead of his time, working on technology like running software in the cloud many years before it became the standard.
“He has the foresight to recognize this is an inevitability and direction we’re going in the future,” Accardi said.
Giannandrea, known by most as “JG,” joined Google after the search giant acquired another startup he cofounded called Metaweb.
Geoffrey Hinton, known as one of the “godfathers” of AI, worked with Giannandrea at Google. Hinton said Giannandrea had a rare skillset among tech executives as both a great researcher and manager. Hinton pointed to a generative AI breakthrough Google made last decade: the ability to automatically caption images using AI.
“He really understood the importance of it,” Hinton said.
By 2018, Giannandrea oversaw AI at Google, and it was seen as a huge coup when Apple poached him that year. Within eight months, he was promoted to Apple’s leadership team, reporting directly to Cook along with other top executives like Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams and services boss Eddy Cue. It was the biggest sign yet Apple was taking AI seriously, especially for future projects like its now-defunct self-driving car project.
So why leave Google, the perceived leader in AI at the time, for Apple? He didn’t like how leadership at Google had trouble making decisions and executing them, instead treating parts of the business like a skunkworks research lab, according to one person who spoke to Giannandrea recently. He found the opposite at Apple: leadership makes a decision, and then the rest of the company gets behind it to make it happen.
But in the six years since joining Apple, Giannandrea hasn’t been in the public view like his peers on Apple’s leadership team often are, showing off the company’s latest products and updates in flashy promotional videos littered with slick edits and dad jokes. Yet his many years of experience and expertise have earned him wide respect among other Silicon Valley leaders.
“I still go to him for wisdom,” said Emil Michael, a former top executive at Uber who also cofounded TellMe with Giannandrea.
Outside of Apple, Giannandrea sits on the board of SETI, the nonprofit organization founded in 1984 to detect radio signals from potential intelligent life across the cosmos. He also ran a data center business with his wife in recent years, which he eventually sold, adding to his list of successful exits at tech companies he cofounded.
At SETI, Giannadrea is an active and engaged board member, and even gave some of his own money to help fund a new project called COSMIC that uses powerful computers to analyze radio signals from outer space, SETI CEO Bill Diamond told CNBC. Giannandrea also sat on a SETI review committee to give feedback on research plans for planetary defenses against asteroids, according to Diamond.
“He’s got a very scientific mind, an engineering mind,” Diamond said. “The question about life beyond Earth fascinates him.”
Some who know Giannandrea told CNBC they’d be surprised if he made an appearance during Apple’s WWDC keynote next week, instead delegating the spotlight to members of his team or Craig Federighi, Apple’s head of software.
“JG is not a showman,” one person who knows him well told CNBC. “That’s not his vibe.”
Sword Health, a startup focused on helping people deal with pain through digital services, is expanding into mental health and has raised additional capital to fuel its growth.
The 10-year-old company is introducing Mind, which uses a combination of artificial intelligence, hardware and human mental health professionals to treat patients with mild depression and anxiety. Sword said Mind will help users access care whenever they need it, rather than during sporadic, hourlong appointments.
“It’s really a breakthrough in terms of how we address mental health, and this is only possible because we have AI,” Sword CEO Virgílio Bento told CNBC in an interview.
Also on Tuesday, Sword announced a $40 million funding round, led by General Catalyst, in a deal that values the company at $4 billion. The fresh cash will support Sword’s efforts to grow through acquisitions, as well as its global expansion and AI model development, the company said.
The round included participation from Khosla Ventures, Comcast Ventures and other firms. Sword had raised a total of more than $450 million as of September, according to PitchBook.
The financing lands as the digital health market shows signs of recovery following a difficult post-Covid stretch, when rising inflation, higher interest rates and a return to in-person activities led to a dramatic retreat in the industry.
Earlier this month, Omada Health, which offers virtual care programs to supports patients with chronic conditions such as diabetes and hypertension, held its Nasdaq debut, though the stock is trading below its initial public offering price. Weeks before that, digital physical therapy provider Hinge Healthhit the New York Stock Exchange. The shares are trading a few dollars above their offer price.
Sword, which was founded in Portugal and is now based in New York, offers tools for digital physical therapy, pelvic health and movement health to help patients manage pain from home and avoid other treatments such as opioids and surgery. Patients can sign up for Sword if it’s supported by their employer or their health plan.
Mind users will receive a wrist wearable called the “M-band” that can measure environmental and physiological signals such as heart rate, sleep and the lighting in a user’s environment. Mind also includes access to an AI Care agent and human mental health professionals, who can deliver services such as traditional talk therapy.
Bento said a human is always involved with a patient’s care, and that AI is not making clinical decisions.
For example, if a patient has an anxiety attack, Sword’s AI will recognize that and could ask a clinician to approve some physical activity for later that day to help with recovery. The clinician would either approve the physical activity that the AI suggested, or override it and propose something else.
“You have an anxiety issue today, and the way you’re going to manage is to talk about it one week from now? That just doesn’t work,” Bento said. “Mental health should be always on, where you have a problem now, and you can have immediate help in the moment.”
Bento said Sword has some clients that have been on a waiting list for Mind, and the startup has been testing the offering with some of its design partners. He said early users have approved of Mind’s personalized approach and convenience.
“We believe that it is really the future of how mental health is going to be delivered in the future, by us and by other companies,” Bento said. “AI plays a very important role, but the use of AI — and I think this is very important — needs to be used in a very smart way.”
Disclosure: Comcast, the parent of Comcast Ventures, is the owner of NBCUniversal, parent company of CNBC.
US President Donald Trump uses a cellphone aboard Marine One before it departs Leesburg Executive Airport in Leesburg, Virginia, on April 24, 2025. Trump is returning to the White House after attending a MAGA, Inc. dinner at the Trump National Golf Club Washington, DC.
Alex Wroblewski | AFP | Getty Images
The Trump Organization’s newly-announced smartphone will likely be made in China, experts say, despite claims that the device will be manufactured in the U.S.
Owned by U.S. President Donald Trump, the company on Monday announced the T1, a gold-colored device which it said would retail for $499. The smartphone will run Google’s Android operating system.
The Trump Organization says the phone will be “built in the United States” — but experts note the phone was likely designed and would be manufactured by a Chinese firm.
“There is no way the phone was designed from scratch and there is no way it is going to be assembled in the U.S. or completely manufactured in the U.S.,” Francisco Jeronimo, vice president at International Data Corporation, told CNBC on Tuesday. “That is completely impossible.”
Jeronimo suggested that the phone would likely be produced by a Chinese original device manufacturer (ODM) — a type of company that designs and manufacturers products based on the specifications of another firm.
“Despite being advertised as an American-made phone, it is likely that this device will be initially produced by a Chinese ODM,” Blake Przesmicki, an analyst at Counterpoint Research said in a note on Monday.
Jeff Fieldhack, research director at Counterpoint Research added that “the U.S. does not have local manufacturing capabilities readily available.”
Smartphone manufacturing came into focus after Trump threatened tariffs on devices imported into the U.S. While those have yet to materialize, the American president has poured scrutiny on Apple‘s supply chain, urging the iPhone maker to manufacture its flagship handset in the U.S. The call is part of a broader desire from Trump to see more manufacturing of electronics be undertaken in the U.S.
Several experts have noted that manufacturing iPhones in the U.S. would be nearly impossible and would certainly raise the price of the product substantially. On top of that, getting large-scale manufacturing off the ground in the U.S. would take several years.
Phone will need foreign components
Even if some manufacturing of the device were done in the U.S., smartphone supply chains are global, and handset components come from several countries.
The Trump Organization’s T1 is no different. While no information has been revealed on particular components, the specifications could give a hint of what to expect.
The device will have a 6.8-inch AMOLED display, a kind of screen that is made primarily by South Korean firm Samsung. LG, another South Korean firm, also produces the screen, as does Chinese firm BOE.
For comparison, Apple’s top end iPhone 16 Pro Max, has a 6.9-inch display and starts at $1,199.
At T1’s $499 price point, the smartphone will likely use a processor from Taiwanese firm MediaTek, which would be manufactured in Taiwan. If the device were to contain a Qualcomm chip instead, that would also likely have to be made in Taiwan.
The phone’s advertised 50-megapixel camera will meanwhile require image sensing chips — a market that is dominated by Japanese firm Sony for smartphones. There are smaller players in China and elsewhere.
The device’s memory is one area that could use American technology, potentially from Micron, which manufactures its components in the U.S. But other players, like South Korea’s Samsung, could be potential suppliers.
“Even when there is local manufacturing available the company will have to rely on components that are being imported from outside the US,” Counterpoint Research’s Fieldhack said.
Chinese tech company Tencent is a gaming giant and the parent company of WeChat, the ubiquitous social messaging app in China.
Cheng Xin | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Tencent has spent years evolving into a gaming and social media giant in China and in the process, has built up its cloud computing capabilities.
The technology firm is now looking to bring that expertise to Europe as it ramps up expansion of its cloud business overseas, Dowson Tong, CEO of Tencent’s cloud group told CNBC.
“We have strengths and competence in very specific technology areas, as well as industry verticals,” Tong said in an interview last week. “These are are very unique technology capabilities that have been developed over many years [and] started from our products in China.”
“So we intend to bring a lot of this technology expertise to Europe. We’re talking to a lot of interested potential customers.”
Tencent’s European push will pitch it against U.S. hyperscalers Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet-owned Google, which collectively make up 70% share of Europe’s cloud market.
But the Chinese firm is hoping to focus on specific areas where it has built up capabilities to differentiate from rivals.
Tong said these include cloud technologies for areas like optimizing video streaming, ensuring a smooth gaming experience, and developing and hosting so-called “super apps” like WeChat — China’s biggest messaging service. WeChat is often seen as the pioneer of super apps, a term that refers to an application with multiple functions, such as messaging and payments.
Tong gave an example of Tencent’s cloud computing work with French telecommunications firm Orange in supporting the company’s Max it app in Africa. In the area of gaming, Tencent’s cloud technology can improve “latency,” which is a technical term for the lag between a player’s actions and what happens on screen, Tong said.
The Chinese company is also betting on European companies opting for multiple cloud providers for services, instead of relying on one or two of the big players.
“I would say that’s actually a … deliberate strategy of ours to make the customers feel more comfortable using our technology, especially in a multi-cloud environment,” he said, adding that customers want to be able to interoperate.
AI push
Cloud computing companies have put an increased focus on selling artificial intelligence tools as a way to boost revenue and differentiate their offerings from rivals.
Tencent has built up its own artificial intelligence foundational model in China called Hunyuan. But it also uses some models created by Chinese firm DeepSeek in its products.
Tong said Tencent would take a similar approach in Europe when it comes to AI, potentially offering products built on European models.
“Our focus would be providing tools that would work with different foundation models and ultimately, it’s the customer’s decision which model works best for them,” Tong told CNBC.
“So I think at the end of the day, we would always go to our customers, find the problems they wanted addressed, provide them tools so that they can accomplish what they need, and realise the cost efficiency that we can offer.”
