Apple Expected to Detail Its A.I. Plans at Conference

Two years ago, Apple promised to deliver artificial intelligence to more than one billion iPhone users around the world. The technology, said Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, would be the “next big step for Apple.”

But the company’s A.I. product, Apple Intelligence, arrived later than expected and made mistakes, leading Apple to disable one of its features. Then the company postponed the release of an improved version of its digital assistant, Siri, because of quality problems.

On Monday, at its annual developer conference in Cupertino, Calif., Apple is expected to take another shot at that big step with A.I. The company is expected to reintroduce the Siri upgrade that it delayed last year, along with A.I. features that will be part of Apple Intelligence.

Siri will become “more personalized,” Apple has said, or more customized to users’ routines, as well as to their relationships and communication with other people. That is expected to help the digital assistant, which has long frustrated consumers with its limited abilities, be more conversational.

But unlike other Big Tech companies, such as Google and Meta, Apple has not reinvented itself around A.I., nor is it spending hundreds of billions of dollars on the technology. It is sticking to what it has done for the past two decades: building an elaborate ecosystem that consumers easily connect to with a device. A.I. is an addition to Apple’s central business of consumer electronics, not the center of the company.

“Apple’s core value is to be in your life — like in your pocket, in your hand, in front of you, in your ear,” said Tom Gruber, who co-founded Siri before Apple acquired it and worked at Apple until 2018. “A.I. is a thing you want to do or use, not a replacement” for Apple’s products.