Apple Hires Former Google & Microsoft Exec Amar Subramanya as New VP Of AI

India-West Staff Reporter

CUPERTINO, CA – Apple has hired veteran artificial intelligence researcher Amar Subramanya as its new vice president of AI, a key appointment that signals how aggressively the company is now moving to strengthen its AI leadership.

Subramanya, 46, is regarded in industry circles as one of the most experienced engineering leaders in applied machine learning. Raised in Bengaluru, he earned his bachelor’s degree in electronics and communications engineering from Bangalore University in 2001 before moving to the United States for graduate studies.

He completed his PhD in computer science at the University of Washington in 2009, focusing on semi-supervised learning and graphical models. During his doctoral work he was selected for the Microsoft Research Graduate Fellowship and later coauthored the book ‘Graph-Based Semi-Supervised Learning,’ contributing research across natural language processing, entity resolution, and speech technologies.

Apple announced on December 1 that Subramanya will report to Craig Federighi and lead several of the company’s most sensitive and high-stakes efforts, including Apple Foundation Models, ML research, and AI safety and evaluation. Executives say his role will be central to shaping upcoming Apple Intelligence features and the next generation of on-device and cloud-assisted AI capabilities.

CEO Tim Cook said Subramanya’s arrival marks an important moment in Apple’s long-term strategy. Cook noted that AI has been core to Apple products for years and described Subramanya’s expertise as essential to accelerating the company’s work.

Before joining Apple, Subramanya spent just a few months at Microsoft, where he served as corporate vice president of AI and helped oversee the foundation models behind Microsoft Copilot. His move to Apple comes on the heels of a rapid rise at Google, where he worked for 16 years and eventually became head of engineering for Gemini, the company’s flagship generative AI assistant.

At both Google and Microsoft, Subramanya earned a reputation for bridging advanced research with real-world product development. Industry analysts say Apple is counting on exactly that blend of skills as competition intensifies across the AI landscape.