But nearly everything else on stage backed one argument: Because Apple controls the hardware, the operating system and the data on a person’s phone, it’s the best-positioned company to deliver artificial intelligence.
“We made massive advancements in the most important areas: intelligence, performance, battery and camera,” Ternus said. Opening the keynote, he called iPhone the best personal device for AI, citing its privacy protections and its deep knowledge of its own users, CNN reported.
Siri anchored that argument. Apple’s rebuilt assistant, branded Siri AI, now works as a standalone app that handles richer answers, natural multistep conversations and actions across more than 300,000 apps, and it’s already among the most widely used digital assistants, handling more than 2.5 billion requests from users every day, the Free Press Journal reported. A new feature called Siri Recap uses ambient listening to generate a title, summary and key points from a conversation, such as a team meeting or a parent-teacher conference. Apple said it won’t store or share the underlying audio, and the feature arrives in beta later this year.
Apple’s Advantage Is Owning Everything Around the AI
That’s the structural bet behind Wednesday’s event, and it’s what separates Apple’s approach from its rivals. Consumer AI agents such as Meta’s newly launched Muse generally require users to hand over credentials and connect each app separately before the agent can act on their behalf, Tech Insider reported. Apple’s Siri, by contrast, already sits inside the operating system, with built-in access to Messages, Calendar, Photos, Health and every other native app, without that same separate authorization step.
We’d love to be your preferred source for news.
Please add us to your preferred sources list so our news, data and interviews show up in your feed. Thanks!
If Siri works as promised, tasks get simple: adding recipe ingredients to a grocery list mid-conversation or flagging an on-screen alert when a tracked webpage changes. Apple isn’t bolting an agent onto someone else’s phone. It’s building the agent into the one people already carry.
Apple backed that software push with new hardware. The company’s newest chip, the A20 Pro, powers the new iPhone Pro models with redesigned “desktop class” cores built specifically to speed up AI processing, and Apple said it’s the first smartphone chip built on TSMC’s latest 2-nanometer process, CNBC reported.
Apple also overhauled the health features inside its Health app with AI-powered coaching: Each morning, the Apple Watch now analyzes recent activity, vitals and sleep, and generates a single score showing a person’s capacity to take on the day, according to Dr. Sumbul Desai, Apple’s vice president of health.
Whether Siri Actually Delivers Is the Real Test
PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster wrote ahead of Wednesday’s keynote that this event, more than the hardware itself, is the real test of Apple’s AI strategy. “The device determines the defaults, the defaults determine the distribution, the distribution determines the usage and the usage determines the revenue,” Webster wrote.
She has also been direct about what Apple’s Gemini arrangement actually means. “Siri now runs on Gemini. … Siri is renting someone else’s brain,” Webster wrote. “Google is now Apple’s AI supplier and its largest single Services customer through the search deal. That’s a dependency on a competitor, twice over,” PYMNTS reported. Notably, Apple didn’t mention Google or Gemini on stage during Wednesday’s presentation, keeping the focus entirely on Apple’s own branding, Apple Foundation Models and Apple Intelligence.
If Siri AI performs the way Apple demonstrated on stage, turning a conversation into a usable summary, adding to a grocery list mid-sentence and coaching a person’s health from real overnight data, then owning the device becomes genuinely game-changing. Every iPhone already in a pocket turns into the most personally informed AI assistant on the market with no new download or credential handoff required. Whether any of it works as smoothly outside a keynote remains to be seen.
For all PYMNTS AI coverage, subscribe to the daily AI Newsletter.
Add as Preferred Source
