Lightshed analyst: Apple is on the wrong path in AI and is replacing its CEO

Apple announced a change in chief executive officer — an event that analyst Walter Pitzik from Lightshed Partners had been publicly demanding for more than a year. According to him, it was precisely the weakness of Apple's AI strategy that made the leadership change inevitable.

Criticism That Was Heard

Pitzik 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 moving in the wrong direction with AI, and without a change in leadership, nothing will change. The main complaint was straightforward: while OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic were rewriting the rules of working with AI assistants, Apple released Apple Intelligence — a feature that it had delayed itself and which the industry received without particular enthusiasm. The partnership with OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT into iOS was perceived by many not as a strategic maneuver, but as an admission that Apple simply had no comparable proprietary development.

What's Wrong With Apple's AI Course

Analysts pointed to systemic problems that had accumulated over years:

• Siri significantly lagged behind ChatGPT and Gemini in dialogue quality and context understanding
• Apple Intelligence launched with delays and was initially available only in the US in English
• Closed ecosystem made life difficult for AI developers: building agents on top of iOS was harder than on Android or the web
• Lack of public API to its own LLM meant that Apple effectively did not participate in shaping the developer market
• Investments in AI infrastructure turned out to be more modest than those of Microsoft and Google, which were investing tens of billions in data centers and AI chips

The market was recording this discrepancy: despite steady iPhone sales, Apple's stock momentum looked modest against companies that aggressively bet on AI.

"Apple is going in the wrong direction with AI,"

Pitzik said on Bloomberg Surveillance. Now his words have received unexpected confirmation.

What to Expect From the New Leader

A CEO change at Apple is a rarest event in the company's corporate history. The last time this happened was in 2011, when Tim Cook replaced Steve Jobs. That transition took place amid the confident dominance of iOS on the eve of the iPhone supercycle. The context now is fundamentally different: the new leader takes over the company at a moment when the entire technological landscape is being reorganized around AI. He will face questions without simple answers — whether to develop frontier models of their own or deepen partnerships, whether to open the ecosystem to AI developers, how to compete with Google, which has AI built into Android and Search at the infrastructure level.

What This Means

Pitzik turned out to be right in his diagnosis — the leadership change happened. Now the main question is not whether the analyst was right, but whether Apple under the new CEO can formulate a convincing AI course. The company held on to its closed perimeter for too long in an era when the entire market was winning from speed and openness. The first decisions of the new leader will be studied by investors and developers far more carefully than any quarterly report.