A vast majority of consumers are willing to wait for Apple Inc.’s long-gestating artificial intelligence (AI) platform despite hiccups in its delivery: A whopping 80% polled said they’re willing to pay at least $10 a month for unlimited access.
The results of a recent Morgan Stanley survey underscore the power of the Apple brand, which belatedly arrived to the smartphone and tablet markets years earlier — and, in both cases, quickly established a large, loyal following that popularized those technologies for the masses.
More than half (54%) of 3,300 respondents in the U.S. who plan to upgrade their iPhone in the next 12 months said it was important it come with Apple Intelligence; 42% deemed it important that their next iPhone come with the new AI platform. The survey results show “stronger-than-expected consumer perception for Apple Intelligence,” Morgan Stanley said.
Apple has trailed rivals Meta Platforms Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google as it makes changes to the technology so it meets internal expectations. The company is working on updates to its Siri digital assistant, pushing back the heavily-hyped features at least several months. The company also discovered that notification summaries misrepresented news reports, forcing it to disable that feature.
Apple, which has overly depended on iPhone-related sales in recent years and hoped to diversify its product portfolio through AI, has been forced through glitches and performance shortfalls to delay some of Apple Intelligence’s most compelling features — such as the ability to work within apps and understand what is occurring on a users’ iPhone screen.
“There is no reason why Apple — and Siri — should not be an AI standard,” Andy Sack, co-founder of AI consultancy firm Forum3 and co-author of the forthcoming book, “AI First,” said in an interview. “But if they continue to stall on AI, they become susceptible” in search, data retrieval and routine tasks performed by the likes of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot, he said.
“The same argument could be made that Amazon, and Alexa, are also lacking and not where they should be,” Sack said. “Both Apple and Amazon are incredibly popular consumer brands that could heavily influence the AI market and spread its use.”
Until then, consumers and developers are patiently awaiting more news from Apple. That could come as early as June, when the company holds its annual worldwide developers conference in the San Francisco Bay Area, or its yearly iPhone announcement, usually hosted at its Cupertino, California, campus in September.
“Apple isn’t falling behind, it is lying in wait,” contends David Nicholson, Futurum Fellow and global technology advisor. “Many aspects of agentic AI require access to personal data in a way that can only be managed within a walled garden. Apple is perfectly positioned. Lots of hares will fall by the wayside along the way. Barring immediate, industry-wide adoption of a standard for managing personal data in the wild, Apple will be the tortoise in this race.”
