Apple WWDC preview: Apple gets a second shot at its AI rollout

Apple (AAPL) will host its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) on Monday at its Cupertino, Calif., headquarters. The event, Tim Cook's last as CEO of the company, will serve as a kind of reboot of Apple's AI strategy, which has lagged behind competing firms' efforts to date. The biggest news out of the show, which runs through June 12, will likely be the debut of Apple's long-delayed, AI-infused version of Siri. The digital assistant landed on iPhones with a good deal of fanfare in 2011 but has largely languished over the years. Siri's deficiencies have become even clearer with the advent of generative AI models, chatbots, and, more recently, AI agents. Apple initially announced a revamped AI version of its helper in 2024, but ran into issues getting it out the door. And while Apple has launched its Apple Intelligence platform, which includes features such as writing tools, image editing, and the company's Visual Intelligence capabilities, it hasn't been enough to allay investors' concerns that Apple has fallen troublingly behind in the AI race. WWDC will likely be the last major event for Tim Cook as CEO of Apple. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images) · Justin Sullivan via Getty Images But the company could put that all behind it with a strong showing at WWDC. We already know that the new version of Siri will run on Google's Gemini AI models, rather than Apple's own AI. According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, the assistant will also get its own app, and you'll be able to communicate with it in a way similar to leading chatbots like ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude. Siri, Gurman reports, will also get multi-step functionality, so you'll be able to tell it to handle several tasks in a single request. It will also be able to draft emails on your behalf. The assistant will now appear at the top of the iPhone's screen in the Dynamic Island, and a new search box, accessible by swiping down from the center of the top of the screen, will let you ask questions and give commands via text. Siri will also be available in the Camera app, where users can quickly look up nutrition information from nutrition labels and import it for meal tracking. Despite not offering its own high-end frontier AI model, analysts say Apple could reap significant rewards from its improved AI push. "Apple Intelligence presents a huge opportunity to reinvent the company, accelerate product replacement cycles, and drive increased services revenue," Bernstein analyst Mark Newman wrote in an investor note. "We estimate 13% upside to [earnings per share] from [an] accelerating replacement cycle and a further 16% upside to EPS from upselling a premium version of Apple Intelligence."