Apple plots a huge AI strategy shift, but it may be too little too late

In a blunt report published Sunday, Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman concludes that Apple “is way behind in AI” and describes this state of affairs as “a major risk for a company that considers itself the top innovator in consumer technology.”

In broad terms, of course, this is not news. Here at Macworld we are long-time critics of Siri, Apple’s most AI-relevant product and a source of endless frustration, and have frequently discussed the company’s glaring absence from the AI arms race.

But the specifics of Gurman’s report are more worrying. There’s a striking contrast between the ambition of what Apple hopes to achieve in AI and the dismaying tardiness of the project’s timeframe. While Google and Microsoft have already launched new AI services and Amazon has announced a revamped Alexa platform, Gurman warns that “the totality of Apple’s generative AI vision will take at least into 2025 to fully scale.” Those words “at least” are especially troubling, given what we know about Apple’s perfectionism and proneness to developmental delays.

Perhaps the timeframe is due to the ambition because there are lots of strands to the project. The company, according to Gurman, wants to add auto-summarize and auto-complete to Pages and other productivity apps; automate playlist creation in Apple Music; launch software development tools with AI tools for code completion; create an AI-based system for AppleCare employees; and, most important of all, launch “a big overhaul” of Siri.

Tallying with long-term rumors, Gurman says Apple’s AI push will be announced at WWDC in June 2024, as part of the launches of iOS 18 and macOS 15. But WWDC is always about the future. Those two operating system updates wouldn’t appear until the fall of this year in any case, but based on Gurman’s sources it sounds like the full extent of Apple’s AI push won’t be felt until next year, by which time AI products may have become commonplace in the consumer tech market.