Tim Cook reportedly tells employees Apple ‘must’ win in AI

Apple CEO Tim Cook held an hourlong all-hands meeting in which he told employees that the company needs to win in AI, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.

The meeting came after an earnings call in which Cook told investors and analysts that Apple would “significantly” increase its AI investments. It seems he had a similar message for Apple employees, reportedly telling them, “Apple must do this. Apple will do this. This is sort of ours to grab.”

Despite launching a variety of AI-powered features in the past year under the Apple Intelligence umbrella, the company’s promised upgrades to its voice assistant Siri have been significantly delayed. And Cook seemed to acknowledge that the company has fallen behind its competitors.

“We’ve rarely been first,” he reportedly said. “There was a PC before the Mac; there was a smartphone before the iPhone; there were many tablets before the iPad; there was an MP3 player before iPod.” But in his telling, that didn’t stop Apple from inventing the “modern” versions of those products.