Lightshed analyst: Apple is on the wrong path in AI, and it's changing CEOs

Apple has announced a change of chief executive, something Lightshed Partners analyst Walter Pitsik has publicly pushed for more than a year. In his view, the weakness of Apple's AI strategy made a leadership change inevitable.

The criticism that got heard

Pitsik is one of the most consistent critics of Apple among Wall Street analysts. Since 2024 he has regularly appeared on Bloomberg Surveillance with the same diagnosis: the company is heading in the wrong direction on AI, and nothing will change without new leadership.

His main complaint was simple: while OpenAI, Google and Anthropic were rewriting the rules for working with AI assistants, Apple shipped Apple Intelligence, a feature it kept delaying itself and that the industry greeted without much enthusiasm. Many saw the partnership with OpenAI to bring ChatGPT into iOS not as a strategic maneuver but as an admission that Apple simply has no comparable in-house technology.

What's wrong with Apple's AI course

Analysts pointed to systemic problems that built up over years:

• Siri lagged well behind ChatGPT and Gemini in conversation quality and understanding of context
• Apple Intelligence launched late and was initially available only in the US, in English
• A closed ecosystem made life harder for AI developers: building agents on top of iOS was harder than on Android or the web
• No public API to its own LLMs meant Apple effectively took no part in shaping the developer market
• Investment in AI infrastructure proved more modest than at Microsoft and Google, which poured tens of billions into data centers and AI chips

The market registered the gap: despite steady iPhone sales, Apple's stock performance looked modest next to companies that bet aggressively on AI.

"Apple is on the wrong path in AI,"

Pitsik said on Bloomberg Surveillance.

Now his words have received unexpected confirmation.

What's expected of the new leader

A CEO change at Apple is an extremely rare event in the company's history. The last one came in 2011, when Tim Cook succeeded Steve Jobs. That transition took place under the firm dominance of iOS, on the eve of the iPhone supercycle. The context now is fundamentally different: the new leader takes over just as the entire technology landscape reorganizes around AI.

They will face questions without easy answers: whether to develop in-house frontier models or deepen partnerships, whether to open the ecosystem to AI developers, and how to compete with Google, which has AI built into Android and Search at the infrastructure level.

What this means

Pitsik got the diagnosis right: the leadership change happened. The main question now is not whether the analyst was right, but whether Apple under a new CEO can articulate a convincing AI course. The company held on to a closed perimeter for too long, in an era when the whole market benefited from speed and openness.

Investors and developers will scrutinize the new leader's first decisions far more closely than any quarterly report.