- Apple has largely refrained from making any big announcements about its AI plans.
- Technology analysts say that makes sense for the company.
- “Apple is rarely first to market,” the analyst told BI.
For much of last year, Apple felt increasing pressure from investors. We are making our debut in the field of generative AI.
Google and Microsoft have been rolling out AI-integrated products (with varying degrees of success), and OpenAI last week announced GPT-4o, an updated version of its hugely popular ChatGPT language model.
Apple's announcements about its AI efforts have been largely limited to media reports and assurances from CEO Tim Cook, who promised in February that AI will “impact every product and service we have.”
Still, the company's investors are growing frustrated: With Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference coming up in June, analysts say the company will need to show off some AI products to keep shareholders happy.
“They have to,” Gene Munster, managing partner at Deepwater Asset Management, told Business Insider. “The future of computing is multimodal AI everywhere.”
But does it matter that the tech company is lagging behind, as many analysts claim?
Carolina Milanesi, principal analyst at technology consulting firm Creative Strategies, told BI that Apple's success is rarely determined by its ability to be first — just look at the iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch.
“Apple is almost never first to market,” Milanesi said. “They like to enter a market and disrupt it. They do everything from wearables to smartphones to tablets. They've never been first to market.”
Blackberry dominated the smartphone market before Apple introduced the iPhone in 2007. Tablets had been around for decades before the iPad was released in 2010. And the Apple Watch only came on the scene after other companies like Sony and Samsung started to get into the wearables space.
Milanesi believes the same is true with AI.
However, analysts argue that AI's impact on Apple is unique because the Cupertino-based company is not as reliant on revenue directly from AI. Despite declining sales, the iPhone remains Apple's revenue driver.
Milanesi said it's important for Apple to demonstrate how integrating artificial intelligence will continue to add value to its existing ecosystem of products and services.
“The way they use AI and drive value back into their business will be very different than how a Google or a Microsoft or an Amazon Web Services does it,” she says. “For these companies, it's all about the cloud, running LLM on the cloud and monetizing it.”
Apple did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment.
