Amazingly, Apple may emerge unscathed from its AI mess

Hello again from Fast Company and welcome back to Plugged In. Throughout its 15-year history, Siri has often seemed to be cursed, or at least an eternal underachiever. Few products have had so much unfulfilled potential for so long. Yet none of the AI assistant’s previous disappointments rivaled the one that began two years ago, when Apple declared that Siri had entered a new era, showed off a profusion of new AI-powered capabilities . . . and then failed to ship them. But Apple is finally on the cusp of putting this epic vaporware fiasco behind it. Judging from the Siri update and other Apple Intelligence AI features unveiled in this week’s keynote at its WWDC developer conference, the company might even extricate itself from the situation with surprisingly minimal damage. To recap the story thus far: At WWDC 2024, Apple depicted Siri complying with fancy, free-form requests such as, “Add this photo to the email I drafted to Madiha and Josh,” “Show me my photos of Stacy in New York wearing her pink coat,” and “Search Fitness+ for new yoga classes.” But when that fall’s updates for iOS, iPadOS, and MacOS arrived, most of Siri’s new features were AWOL. In March 2025, Apple acknowledged that they were unexpectedly challenging to implement and said it expected to roll them out in “the coming year.” That turned out to mean “by the end of 2026.” The lengthy postponement provided plenty of time for additional shoes to drop. Last December, Apple’s artificial intelligence chief, John Giannandrea—whose bona fides as a technologist had never translated into much progress for Siri—announced his retirement. His departure was part of a reshuffling that included the arrival of Amar Subramanya, a Google and Microsoft alum, as VP of AI. A few months later, Mike Rockwell, the Apple Vision Pro godfather, was put in charge of Siri. And in January of this year, Apple and Google announced that the latter company’s Gemini AI model and cloud technology would be ingredients in