Can Apple turn Siri into your very own Agentic AI?
If Apple succeeds in making Siri contextually aware and if the company also succeeds in building an Answers engine that delivers more accurate answers in its domains than other GenAI services, can it also give Siri wings? Can it turn Siri into an agentic agent?
I think there’s a possibility it could, and here’s why.
What is Agentic AI?
Agentic AI is understood to be a kind of autonomous AI that can handle complex tasks, using LLMs to reason, plan complex, multi-step tasks, and adapt to dynamic situations. OpenAI cites consumer-focused examples of the kind of thing agentic AI in Chat GPT can accomplish:
- Look at your calendar and brief you on upcoming client meetings based on recent news.
- Plan and buy ingredients to make Japanese breakfast for four.
- Analyze three competitors and create a slide deck.
But it is arguable that agentic AI can go further than those request-based examples. IBM says “Agentic AI is an artificial intelligence system that can accomplish a specific goal with limited supervision.” Gartner describes it as an AI that can independently observe, make decisions, and execute tasks with limited human guidance.
What that means to people
So, you might have built an agentic AI system that picks up information on your behalf to feed back to you in a requested format. Those could be weekly health reports, along with recommendations for the week ahead.
Systems like these may proactively analyze your incoming email to give you a daily summary of the important items before you even open your in-box, or to work on your behalf to identify documents or other items you might need to respond to those communications.
Those imagination-limited examples can be supplemented by others, such as AI-powered trading bots capable of executing stock trades on your behalf (not as silly as it sounds); smart home systems keeping the lights on and managing home security, fraud detection and automated penetration testing – basically any scenario which can be digitized can be to some extent automated.
Gartner predicts that by 2029, as many as 80% of customer service issues will be resolved autonomously using agentic AI. (Apple likely hopes to handle at least some of those calls itself using Apple Business Chat).
What Apple already provides
The thing about these examples is that many of them relate directly to the kind of tasks Apple users may already expect Siri to be able to help them with. As Apple Intelligence evolves and Siri gets improved, we can easily anticipate Cupertino’s chatbot surfacing ambient data that feeds into the answers it provides.
The kind of contextual intelligence Apple is allegedly trying to put inside Siri is essential to being able to do this.
If not now then… later
The thing is, once it can get its digital hands on that kind of ambient information, the next step is to be able to push it through complex workflows to deliver results, results that can themselves change in real time in response to relevant ambient circumstances. If you have Siri doing an ongoing calculation based on height and velocity, then the answer to that calculus will change with your altitude.
All of this seems possible, assuming Apple can get the basics right.
In terms of implementation, I imagine the company will focus on simpler, mass market tasks that may benefit from such an approach. I guess like shopping lists based on recipes, items known to be in the larder, combined against product availability, for instance, possibly combined with ordering the products for you.
All of this should be possible with Siri, particularly as App Intents come online, which will enable Ai on your device to grab input and services from those systems, too. Plus, of course, if Apple really is working in this direction with its forthcoming Siri update – which would turn the chatbot into a truly effective virtual assistant, capable of running off to address quite complex tasks over time – well, if Appe is working on at I guess we may now understand better why doing so has taken a bit of extra time.
We’ll find out more in spring, I suppose.
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