Apple Intelligence shows the direction of travel for AI use in IR

It’s June, which means IR conference season is upon us. Many of you will be attending events this month to catch up with peers, learn about emerging trends and get the latest on new IR workflow tools.

While the big IR event this week was the NIRI conference in San Francisco, there was another gathering in California that has important implications for how IR tech could evolve.

On Monday, at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in Cupertino, the tech giant announced how it will embed AI capabilities into a range of its existing services, such as search, text editing, image generation and notifications.

Many of the ways Apple Intelligence can help you will be familiar. For example, once you have written an email, you can quickly change the tone to make it more friendly, professional or concise. Long documents can be summarized in an instant with a TLDR (too long, didn’t read) option.

Turning to search, Apple says it will be able to find relevant content within your device more easily, and also draw smart connections between different items. In one of its promotional videos, someone asks when his mum’s flight will land. The phone understands who you are talking about and cross-references that with your emails to find the arrival time.

What’s most interesting about the announcement isn’t the capabilities on show – although the ability to create your own emoji did grab a lot of headlines – but rather the different approach Apple is taking compared with other tech leaders.

The company wants to enhance existing tasks, not provide a creative tool that attempts to do everything. The idea is that users are more likely to get the results they want, and shouldn’t have to deal with complicated prompt engineering or hallucinations, where AI models present inaccurate or misleading information as fact.

On the flip side, Apple Intelligence has less creative power than other options. The company has sought to address this by signing a partnership with OpenAI that makes ChatGPT available directly through Apple services like Siri. But users will be asked for consent before any queries are sent to the chatbot, signaling that it is an external service providing the answer.

For the IR world, this announcement highlights the direction of travel for AI. It’s gradually being implemented into all of the existing tools we use, and honed to be more practical and predictable. It’s in this quieter, less flashy way that AI may have the biggest impact on how we do our jobs.

How are you making use of AI within your IR department? Get in touch and let us know at tim.human@irmagazine.com or on LinkedIn.