Agentic Siri is coming, and that’s just the beginning
Macworld ·
Macworld Siri AI is just the beginning. According to the latest newsletter from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman , who is always dialed-in to the inner workings of Apple, the new CEO John Ternus is pushing to make Apple a bigger player in the AI space. While he had great things to say publicly about Siri AI at the launch of iOS 27, he is apparently delivering a somewhat different message in private. He seems aware, Gurman said, of the fact that Apple’s AI offerings are far behind rivals and not moving ahead with the same urgency. In a closed-door meeting with Craig Federighi, Ternus pushed to accelerate the company’s roadmap and move quickly past the long-overdue improvements to Siri. With the OS 27.3 updates, developers will finally be able to make their apps accessible to Siri , so that Siri can perform in-app actions and access their data, if desired. Along with on-screen awareness and personal context, it’s the final pillar of the advanced capabilities Apple first announced two years ago. But the latest trend in AI is agents. What started with hobbyist software like OpenClaw has grown into consumer-ready products like Meta’s Muse, OpenAI’s Dots, and Anthropic’s Claude Duet. These AI agents run continuously and somewhat autonomously, taking care of almost anything a person can do online or on their phone or computer. There are some concerns over privacy and safety, and rightfully so, but they have already proven to be very popular. That is a big step beyond “tell Siri to take actions within apps” and it’s where Ternus would like to take things. Gurman said Apple could make Siri act more like an autonomous agent “as early as next year,” and notes that the company hardly has a choice–announcing such a major feature at WWDC in June would put Apple a year behind the principal players else in the AI space, at least. Gurman’s report paints the picture of a CEO concerned not just with matching AI companies feature-for-feature, but recognizing the increasing role of AI in computer use in general. The general idea is that, over time, more of what we do on our computing devices will be handled not by typing, clicking, and swiping, but by a personal agent that can essentially use any software we want it to at our direction. If you’re a company like Apple whose strength comes from selling physical computing devices and creating the operating systems that runs on them, ceding that level of control to a rival company could be an existential threat.