In early June, Apple Inc. unveiled its artificial intelligence strategy with the announcement of its Apple Intelligence technology that will be integrated in its devices and apps.

Apple’s AI vision is based on a system that processes AI tasks on devices and utilizes encrypted, temporary cloud exchanges for the more complex workloads.

“What’s unique about this versus some of the AI that’s out there is it’s a hybrid model, kind of an AI platform,” said David Linthicum, principal analyst for theCUBE Research. “The majority of the processing takes place on the phone or the device, and they’re going to support iPads, they are going to support iMacs and they are obviously going to support iPhones. You’re going to get it free if you are an Apple user, so it will be interesting to see how people use this technology in a productive state.”

The “AI Insights and Innovation” podcast is the go-to podcast for the latest news, trends and insights in artificial intelligence, including generative AI. In this edition, Linthicum takes a closer look at how Apple Intelligence will impact enterprises and the challenge of promising personalized AI services while safeguarding data privacy.

Leveraging Apple Intelligence for productivity gains

Apple’s ability to leverage AI for users to realize productivity gains will be one of the biggest net benefits in the enterprise, according to Linthicum. AI functionality in operating systems across siloed applications, such as calendaring, messaging and word processing, are likely to have a positive effect. Yet that may be offset by the cost associated with purchasing AI-equipped Apple products.

“This is going to have some positive and negative effects,” Linthicum said. “I think people are going to find that having an AI system to front end the Apple ecosystem, making that system easier to use once they figure out how to use Apple Intelligence correctly … is going to provide some productivity gains. The negative effect, at least for enterprises, is it’s probably going to force an upgrade of very expensive devices.”

Apple’s announcement included a focus on security and how the company would allay privacy concerns. Most of Apple Intelligence’s AI processing will be on-device, and when greater processing power is required, Apple’s Private Cloud Compute will provide the verifiable platform to safeguard privacy.

“They are going to focus on privacy, in other words, they are going to be able to provide better security, better privacy for the systems,” Linthicum said. “I think that ultimately that may be the case, other than the fact that if you get your phone stolen and [thieves] are able to break into it, there could be some sensitive data that’s on the phone itself. Apple’s Private Cloud Compute ensures that personal data is used for specific AI tasks, and they only reach out to some sort of back end AI system if it’s needed.”

Integrating ChatGPT into Apple products

Another element of Apple’s AI initiative involves the integration of OpenAI’s ChatGPT into iOS 18, iPad 18 and macOS Sequoia. Apple users will be able to call up ChatGPT inside various apps for writing or query/answer support.

“They also have a deal with ChatGPT and the OpenAI [technology], and so they can leverage that large language model as well and I suspect that other LMMs will be integrated into this,” Linthicum noted.

How Apple’s AI initiatives will change the competitive landscape remains to be seen. The company has thrown its hat into a ring where the top three hyperscalers – Amazone Web Services Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Google LLC – are all moving rapidly to deploy their own AI solutions.

“We’re going to see similar kinds of moves from Microsoft and other systems out there, probably the Google Office products, even cloud-based systems where we’re interacting with an AI interface to allow us to orchestrate and integrate the various back end services,” Linthicum said.

Enterprises looking to upgrade technology will probably be intrigued by Apple’s AI offerings and the goal of becoming more productive with devices. Yet Linthicum cautions that the company’s latest announcement is not necessarily groundbreaking news.

“Is this revolutionary? Not really,” Linthicum said. “We’ve had systems that you can use to front end different ecosystems now, and things we can use on our phones and on our computers that can do things like this. Probably what is unique is that Apple’s fronting its own stuff. They own the ecosystem.”

Here is the complete discussion from David Linthicum, part of the “AI Insights and Innovation” podcast series on theCUBE:

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