Apple Signals AI Will Power Payments Security and Growth

Apple just turned in what CEO Tim Cook called “a quarter for the record books” Thursday (Jan. 29) and the headline numbers back him up. But for the banking, payments and digital commerce crowd, the more interesting thread running through Apple’s fiscal 2026 first-quarter earnings call for the period ending Dec. 27 wasn’t just iPhone demand, it was how Cook is positioning Apple Intelligence as a business lever, why Apple picked Google as a key AI partner, and what Apple says it’s doing to keep payments safer.

Cook framed Apple Intelligence less as a standalone product and more as an operating-system-level capability that can raise the value of its entire ecosystem and, by extension, create room to monetize across hardware and services. He pointed to early usage and practical features rather than grand “AI platform” rhetoric, emphasizing that the experience is meant to be “personal” and “private,” integrated into the way customers already use iPhone.

That framing mattered when analysts pressed him on the most investor-friendly AI question: where’s the revenue upside? Cook didn’t put a price tag on AI features, but he did connect the dots to broader monetization opportunities.

“We’re bringing Intelligence to more of what people love,” he said. “And we’re integrating it across the operating system in a personal and private way. And I think that by doing so it creates great value and that opens up a range of opportunities across our products and services.”

That “range of opportunities” language is doing a lot of work. If AI meaningfully improves discovery, shopping, customer service, identity workflows or in-app conversion, the upside doesn’t have to show up as an “AI subscription.” It can show up as more device upgrades, more Services engagement, and more commerce activity flowing through Apple’s rails from the App Store to Apple Pay.

Partnership with Google

The other AI moment that landed: Cook’s explanation of Apple’s newly announced partnership with Google, which he cast as a technology decision anchored in capability with privacy guardrails intact. Asked why Apple went with Google and whether there’s a revenue component similar to search, Cook said Apple chose Google because it was the best foundation for what Apple wants to build next.

“We basically determined that Google’s AI technology would provide the most capable foundation for … Apple foundation models,” Cook said. “And we believe that we can unlock a lot of experiences and innovate in a key way. Due to the collaboration, we’ll continue to run on the device and run in private cloud compute and maintain our industry leading privacy standards in doing so.”

He added that Apple isn’t disclosing deal terms.

Cook also made a pointed claim about payments risk, a topic that’s only getting louder as fraud attacks scale across digital channels. “Apple Pay eliminated more than $1 billion in fraud for our partners last year,” he said, while noting the service is expanding to more markets. For issuers, merchants, and PSPs, Apple is effectively arguing that device-centric security, network tokenization, and platform controls can drive measurable fraud reduction, and that Apple intends to keep investing there.

By the Numbers

All of this came on top of blowout topline performance: Apple posted $143.8 billion in quarterly revenue, up 16% year over year, with diluted EPS of $2.84. iPhone revenue hit $85.3 billion (up 23%), Services reached an all-time high of about $30 billion (up 14%), and greater China sales climbed to $25.5 billion, a 38% year-over-year jump driven largely by iPhone.