AI: a technology in search of a job

An Office Hours question asked by Bob V., July 31, 2026.

Q: I've seen mostly positive reviews from the press about the AI features in Apple's public betas. How well do you think Apple is doing in pushing back against the perception that they're “too late to AI”?

It seems like by now that story has played out. Most of the reviews have been positive since WWDC. But then it turned into a discussion saying: well, it's not going to move the needle, it's going to take too long, there's dependency on Google, and this and that. None of this matters. AI, from a consumer point of view, is still a technology searching for a job to be done. I'm not in any way a bear on AI. I'm not dismissive of it. But what they call product-market fit hasn't happened. It has niches, and they're not consumers. There are individual users and buyers of the technology, and they might be using it on a day-to-day basis, but that's very early days. It doesn't have that resonance yet. It needs to be packaged in certain ways.

Quality is first and foremost, and once we see how it works, people will slowly, slowly discover things to do with it. And those will resonate. We got there the same way with social media. We got there with short video. We got there with the idea of a great camera on the phone. Nobody asked for it, and when you gave it to them, they went: what do I need so much quality for? I have three lenses on my phone — why do I need three lenses? But it turns out that camera turned out to be a killer app.

So how do we get there? I don't think it's ChatGPT. That's like saying TCP/IP. That's like saying Intel 8088 — something technical. It's also an interface that's notoriously low bandwidth. You have to converse in language, in complex language, prompts, as if we're dealing with a keyboard, the old days of the command line. And I think Apple's initial attempt, which failed, was to make things like emojis, and image editing, and trivial things. Those aren't apps either; those are features. The app is not a technology, it's not a feature. It's something that packages all those things, and does it in a way that's easy to discover and to evolve.

That's the problem Apple faces: it isn't something you can test for, because the number of queries that could be made is indefinite. And I don't think it's very easy to modularize the problem. If you're looking for high quality at all times, which is how Apple operates, it's difficult to meet that criteria. Siri is a natural thing here. Siri was way ahead of its time as an idea, and implementing Siri with the latest technologies makes sense. Maybe Siri usage will go up and up — but that's not a business. Siri is a feature.

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Editor's Note: This was one of the questions asked by participants in Asymco's July 2026 Office Hours live Q&A session, held the day after Apple's FQ3 2026 earnings and open to Asymco One subscribers.

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