Indian-Origin Leaders Dominating AI World in Top Tech Companies
Amar Subramanya has been appointed as the AI Vice President at Apple, taking over from John Giannandrea, who is retiring in May 2026. This hiring is part of the talent war in Silicon Valley, where top engineers are lured with high salaries and bonuses. At Apple, Subramanya will lead AI initiatives, including making Siri smarter and managing a team of 700 engineers.
Before joining Apple on December 1, Subramanya had a distinguished career at Google, where he led foundational models, machine learning research, and AI safety teams. He worked with the Google AI Assistant Gemini engineering team. He worked at Google for 16 years (2009-2025), moving from a staff research scientist to an engineering vice president. He had a brief stint at Microsoft in 2025 but left after less than five months to join Apple.
Amar Subramanya: From Bengaluru to Seattle
Amar Subramanya is an Indian-origin AI researcher born in Bengaluru. He earned his Bachelor of Engineering (B.E.) degree in Electrical, Electronics, and Communication Engineering from Bangalore University in 2001. He completed his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Washington in Seattle between 2005-2009.
Early Career: During his graduate studies, Subramanya was a visiting researcher at Microsoft Research and received the Microsoft Research Graduate Fellowship in 2007. In 2001, he worked as a software engineer at IBM for 10 months.
Google Career: Subramanya worked at Google for 16 years, from 2009 to 2025. He started as a staff research scientist and reached the position of Engineering Vice President. From 2023, he was the engineering head of Google's Gemini AI Assistant and was part of the DeepMind team.
Microsoft: In 2025, Subramanya joined Microsoft as Corporate Vice President of AI. He worked on foundational models and the Copilot chatbot. However, he left Microsoft after just five months.
Research and Publications: Subramanya has published several papers on Speech Recognition, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Entity Resolution, and Multilingual NLP. He also co-authored the book "Graph-Based Semi-Supervised Learning" with Partha Pratim Talukdar.