Dive Brief:

• Apple has hired a well-known artificial intelligence (AI) researcher from Carnegie Mellon University to head its AI research efforts.

• Russ Salakhutdinov tweeted on Monday that he accepted a job as director of AI research at Apple, Bloomberg News reports.

• Salakhutdinov has published research on neural networks, an area of AI critical to voice and image recognition technology.

Dive Insight:

Several of the tech industry’s biggest players have been investing in AI in recent months. Apple has fallen behind well-known competitors such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon. when it comes to AI, but it’s working hard to make up ground. Apple bought machine learning company Turi Inc. in August. AI an

Last month, a 9to5Mac report said Apple was forming a new machine learning division. The new division will focus on integrating machine learning tech into new and existing Apple products and Apple is hiring AI application developers, data scientists and researchers, such as Salakhutdinov, for the new division. The company will likely make improving Siri, the company’s virtual assistant, one of its priorities. Users have criticized Siri for evolving slowly compared to the virtual assistants from companies such as Google.

Though most of its machine learning applications are currently consumer-based, Apple will likely look to introduce machine learning into enterprise offerings soon in order to further differentiate itself in the enterprise market. The company is increasingly turning to the enterprise for new sources of profit.