Two years ago, Apple promised to deliver artificial intelligence to more than one billion iPhone users around the world. The technology, said Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, would be the “next big step for Apple.”
But the company’s A.I. product, Apple Intelligence, arrived later than expected and made mistakes, leading Apple to disable one of its features. Then the company postponed the release of an improved version of its digital assistant, Siri, because of quality problems.
On Monday, at its annual developer conference in Cupertino, Calif., Apple is expected to take another shot at that big step with A.I. The company is expected to reintroduce the Siri upgrade that it delayed last year, along with A.I. features that will be part of Apple Intelligence.
Siri will become “more personalized,” Apple has said, or more customized to users’ routines, as well as to their relationships and communication with other people. That is expected to help the digital assistant, which has long frustrated consumers with its limited abilities, be more conversational.
But unlike other Big Tech companies, such as Google and Meta, Apple has not reinvented itself around A.I., nor is it spending hundreds of billions of dollars on the technology. It is sticking to what it has done for the past two decades: building an elaborate ecosystem that consumers easily connect to with a device. A.I. is an addition to Apple’s central business of consumer electronics, not the center of the company.
“Apple’s core value is to be in your life — like in your pocket, in your hand, in front of you, in your ear,” said Tom Gruber, who co-founded Siri before Apple acquired it and worked at Apple until 2018. “A.I. is a thing you want to do or use, not a replacement” for Apple’s products.
The conference coincides with Apple’s most important inflection point in years. Mr. Cook plans to step down as chief executive this year and be replaced by John Ternus, the company’s head of hardware engineering. Mr. Ternus has said Apple doesn’t want consumers to think about A.I. when using their products, even if the technology is behind a new feature.
Apple’s conference is expected to bring thousands of people — largely those who make apps for its devices — to its headquarters. The company uses the event to showcase new software and technology in the operating systems for iPhones, Macs and other devices.
Apple declined to comment.
The A.I. strategy will test Apple’s ability to push new technology into the mainstream. The company has a reputation for blending once-nascent technologies, like digital music files, into popular products with polished software, like the iPod. But because its efforts to reboot Siri in the A.I. era have been so messy, it’s unclear whether its software-first approach will remain relevant in the coming years.
Apple is “skating to where the puck was three years ago,” said Michael Gartenberg, a consumer technology analyst who worked as a product marketer at Apple from 2013 to 2016. The company has downplayed the importance of A.I. because it hasn’t yet caught up, he added, even when people are starting to use A.I. for all kinds of things, like searching the web, checking email and composing documents.
“They do a very good job at selling slabs of glass that take very good pictures, and they can probably keep doing that because it’s a good business,” Mr. Gartenberg said. “I just don’t think it’s something people can get excited about anymore, much like Microsoft releasing a new version of Windows.”
The rest of the technology industry is taking a much more aggressive approach to A.I. Google, for example, has incorporated A.I. into its staple products, including Gmail, Google Maps, Google Chrome and YouTube. It is requiring people to use the technology on its most popular service, its search engine, and it has released phones with A.I. that can control users’s apps for them.
Siri’s expected update will be its biggest since Apple released the digital assistant in 2011. In a demonstration at the time, Siri was able to provide the time in Paris and pull up a list of Greek restaurants. But Siri languished over the next decade.
In 2024, Apple said it would revamp Siri and introduce Apple Intelligence, which would include features like summarizing notifications and improving emails and text messages. The company also struck a deal with OpenAI so consumers could allow Apple’s products to use OpenAI’s chatbot, ChatGPT, to answer more complex questions.
But Apple struggled to deliver on its promises, culminating in the postponement of the Siri upgrade, and its relationship with OpenAI has soured. In January, Apple said it would team up with Google to use Google’s A.I. models and cloud computing services to power Apple’s A.I. products.
Apple has a long history of using technology from Google, with Google paying about $20 billion annually to be the default search engine in Apple’s Safari web browser.
But Apple and Google have also clashed. In the late 2000s, tensions between them flared when Google released features on the Android version of Google Maps but not the Apple iOS version. Apple eventually created its own mapping app.
“Apple has deep scar tissue around being put over a barrel by a competitor,” said John Burkey, who worked on Siri from 2014 to 2016. But the company could find itself in that position again with A.I., where “Google can take Apple’s lunch money right now,” he added.
Apple is a latecomer to the A.I. boom despite its longtime pursuit of the idea of a digital assistant. In 1987, the company released a concept video for a digital assistant called Knowledge Navigator. That video helped inspire a group of researchers at SRI International to create Siri in 2008. In 2010, Apple bought Siri for more than $200 million.
“The vision was to have an assistant that can help you navigate the digital world, your activities, your interactions,” said Dimitra Vergyri, the president of information and computing sciences at SRI International.
With today’s advances in A.I., Ms. Vergyri said, Siri and other digital assistants face a new question: “What is the next level of capabilities that we’re getting out of this?”
