Apple is expected to enter the AI ​​race with ambitions to overtake the early leaders.

Apple Inc.'s annual Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday is expected to herald the company's foray into generative artificial intelligence, marking the company's belated entry into the cutting edge of a technology that promises to be as revolutionary as the invention of the iPhone.

The unveiling of the AI ​​that will be built into iPhones and other Apple products is widely expected to be the highlight of the event that traditionally previews the next version of the software that underpins the company's hardware lineup.

Apple's next-generation software is also expected to be packed with AI features to make its often-clumsy virtual assistant Siri smarter and enable a more productive and enjoyable experience with photos, music, text messages and even instant emoji creation.

Given its secretive nature, Apple has not released any advance details about the event, which will be held on Monday at its headquarters in Cupertino, California.

But CEO Tim Cook has strongly hinted in his first few months that Apple is ready to reveal big plans to enter the sector that has driven the industry's boom over the past 18 months.

The AI ​​fever is a key reason why the market capitalization of Nvidia, the leading maker of the chips that underpin the technology, has soared to nearly $3 trillion from about $300 billion at the end of 2022. The surge helped Nvidia briefly overtake Apple last week to become the second-most valuable company in the U.S. Earlier this year, Microsoft also overtook the iPhone maker, given the success of its AI efforts so far.

But analysts are increasingly concerned that Apple is falling too far behind in the fast-changing field of AI, a concern exacerbated by the company's unusually long period of sluggish sales. Google and Samsung have both already launched smartphone models with AI features as their main attraction.

That has analysts like Wedbush Securities' Dan Ives seeing Monday's conference as a potential catalyst for catapulting Apple into a new, stronger phase of growth. Ives believes that building more AI into its iPhones, iPads and Mac computers could add $450 billion to $600 billion to Apple's market capitalization.

Monday's conference “will be Apple's most important event in over a decade as the pressure to deliver a generative AI tech stack for developers and consumers is at the forefront,” Ives wrote in a research note.

Apple could certainly use the boost that AI would provide, especially for its 13-year-old assistant, Siri, which Forrester Research's Dipanjan Chatterjee now calls a “weirdly ineffective helper.”

Meanwhile, OpenAI's ChatGPT is becoming increasingly conversational, recently sparking accusations that it deliberately copied AI software voiced by Scarlett Johansson, and Google last month previewed an AI “agent” called Astra that can supposedly see and remember things.

Various unconfirmed reports ahead of Monday's conference suggested that Apple will use AI to improve Siri and may partner with OpenAI to bring some elements of ChatGPT to iPhones.

This marks the second year in a row that Apple has made waves at its developers conference by taking the lead in entering a trendy technology that other companies have already entered.

Last year, Apple showed an early preview of its mixed-reality headset, the Vision Pro, but it didn't go on sale until earlier this year, and its steep $3,500 price tag was a big obstacle to widespread adoption. But Apple's tweaked mixed reality approach, which it calls “spatial computing,” is raising hopes that it can turn what is currently a niche technology into a big market.

Part of the optimism stems from Apple's history of rolling out technologies later than others and then overcoming late starts and setting new trends through a combination of slick design and services and slick marketing campaigns.

“Apple's early reluctance to AI was entirely a branding issue,” Forrester's Chatterjee said in a preview of the company's Developer Conference. “The company has famously always been obsessed with how its products deliver to customers, rather than what they deliver to them.”

In particular, introducing more AI into iPhones is likely to raise privacy concerns, where Apple has worked hard to convince its loyal customer base that it won't pry too deeply into their personal lives.

One way Apple can reassure consumers that their iPhones can't be used to spy on them is to use its own chip technology to process most AI-based functions on the device itself, rather than in a distant data center known as “the cloud.” This approach also protects Apple's profit margins, because AI technology run via the cloud is much more expensive than running it on the device alone.