Apple’s AI opportunity is all about the big picture

We’ve seen two approaches to AI in mobile technology this year: “AI that’s not your phone” and “AI that does random things on your phone.”

The “Not Your Phone” group includes devices like the Rabbit R1 and the Humane AI Pin, two small devices that sought to make AI more useful by turning it into a smaller, simpler device. It hasn’t gone very well. Both devices came with big promises of helping us accomplish tasks without looking at our phone screen. Neither was delivered.

Now it’s time for Apple, like Google and Microsoft before it, to announce a bunch of AI features at its annual developer conference today. But the current state of AI in our phones is unimpressive. “AI doing random things on your phone” includes Google’s generative AI tools like Magic Editor, Samsung Galaxy AI, and that sort of thing. Right now, it’s a bunch of party tricks that range in quality from “kind of useful” to “really doesn’t work” to “oh dear GOD no.” It’s definitely not the bold new future of mobile computing we were promised.

The company that came closest to showing us an AI feature that could actually save us some time was Microsoft. At its developer conference last month, the company announced Recall for its new Copilot Plus PCs – a feature that takes screenshots every few seconds of everything you’re doing on your computer so you can use AI to look it up later. I could use this, like, yesterday. But perhaps it’s a good thing that Recall isn’t more widely available yet; It appears there are serious security concerns.

During its keynote today, it will be Apple’s turn to champion AI as our daily assistant – and the signs so far are encouraging. Some of the rumors sound like things we’ve heard before, like AI voice memo transcripts and summaries, but the latest reports point to features with “broad appeal.” Siri would be a sensible home for things like this, and all signs point to a big update for iOS’s virtual assistant. Most attractive of all, Siri may be able to do things on your phone for you. You know, the things virtual assistants have promised to do for the last decade.

However, Apple has a real balancing act to strike to make this a reality. The company reportedly doesn’t have a blockbuster LLM ready to announce, so it will likely call a bell: OpenAI. But public trust in this company isn’t exactly at an all-time high, and Apple will have to balance its emphasis on privacy with the need to move data to the cloud. It may have some clever privacy solutions on its hands, but it seems likely that the age of AI could lead Apple to trust third parties more than it has historically preferred.

As always, Apple comes to the table with a big advantage: control over software and hardware. In theory, this is something Google has with its Pixel phones, but there’s a limit to what it’s been able to do with Android, as it needs to work for every other member of the ecosystem as well. Google’s recent reorganization suggests it sees an advantage in hardware and software teams working closer together, but for better or worse, Apple has a big advantage here. Even though the new and improved Siri can only access Apple’s apps for you at first, that’s still a lot of apps that many people use on a daily basis.

One thing is certain: Apple, the company that is “late” to AI, finds itself with an opening in the field wide enough for a truck to pass through.