Having recently worked at Apple on the software side, my general experience was that it was fiefdom driven, there is no internal standardization on quality or process. Low level teams compete on ideas and careful politicking usually wins over quality or merit.

For AI, there were top down directives to find new ways to experiment with and incorporate into core products and processes, but as you went down the management chain, management became more conservative. First and second line managers were strongly incentivized to keep their products, roadmaps, and interfaces stable and predictable by similarly conservative stakeholders. And as such, they were generally unwilling to officially dedicate much effort to AI other than the minimum “look at how much we’re using Claude”.

In particular due to the lack of central tooling, any team trying to do much with AI essentially had to reinvent much of the stack themselves. So even small projects were largely untenable due to inevitable required scope creep.