Apple CEO Tim Cook Tells Staff AI 'Ours to Grab'

Apple Inc. Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook, holding a rare all-hands meeting following earnings results, rallied employees around the company’s artificial intelligence prospects and an “amazing” pipeline of products. The executive gathered staff at Apple’s on-campus auditorium Friday in Cupertino, California, telling them that the AI revolution is “as big or bigger” as the internet, smartphones, cloud computing and apps. “Apple must do this. Apple will do this. This is sort of ours to grab,” Cook told employees, according to people aware of the meeting. “We will make the investment to do it.” The iPhone maker has been late to AI, debuting Apple Intelligence months after OpenAI, Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Microsoft Corp. and others flooded the market with products like ChatGPT. And when Apple finally released its AI tools, they fell flat.

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports.

But Cook struck an optimistic tone, noting that Apple is typically late to promising new technologies.

“We’ve rarely been first,” the executive told staffers. “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 Apple invented the “modern” versions of those product categories, he said. “This is how I feel about AI.”

An Apple spokesperson declined to comment on the gathering.

The hourlong meeting addressed a range of topics, including the retirement of operating chief Jeff Williams, increasing Apple TV+ viewership and advances in health care with features like the AirPods Pro hearing-aid technology. It also touched on donations and community service by Apple employees, the company’s goal to become carbon neutral by 2030, and the impact of regulations.

“The reality is that Big Tech is under a lot of scrutiny around the world,” Cook said. “We need to continue to push on the intention of the regulation and get them to offer that up, instead of these things that destroy the user experience and user privacy and security.”

Cook often holds town hall-style chats when visiting Apple’s offices around the world, but companywide meetings from the Steve Jobs Theater at headquarters are unusual.

The remarks followed a blockbuster earnings report, with sales growing nearly 10% during the June quarter. That beat Wall Street expectations and eased concerns about iPhone demand and a slowdown in China.

Apple still faces myriad challenges, including Trump administration tariffs and a regulatory crackdown on its business practices. The company said Thursday that tariffs would bring a $1.1 billion headwind this quarter, though Apple was upbeat about sales growth. It also said that App Store revenue rose by a percentage in the double digits last quarter, despite efforts in the EU and elsewhere to further restrict that business.

Echoing comments he made during the earnings conference call, Cook told employees the company is investing in AI in a “big way.” He said 12,000 workers were hired in the last year, with 40% of the new hires joining in research and development roles.

Apple’s chip development efforts, led by executive Johny Srouji, are key to the company’s AI strategy, Cook said. Apple is working on a more powerful cloud-computing chip — code-named Baltra — to power artificial intelligence features, Bloomberg News has reported. It’s also setting up a new AI server manufacturing facility in Houston.

The meeting included Craig Federighi, senior vice president of software engineering, who discussed the future of Apple’s Siri voice assistant. The company had planned to roll out a Siri overhaul as part of Apple Intelligence earlier this year, adding the ability to tap into user data to better fulfill requests. It was delayed, spurring management changes for the company’s AI work.

Federighi explained that the problem was caused by trying to roll out a version of Siri that merged two different systems: one for handling current commands — like setting timers — and another based on large language models, the software behind generative AI.

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