John Ternus talks about plans to improve Siri AI

During Apple’s quarterly earnings call, CEO John Ternus was repeatedly asked about the future of Siri AI. Here’s what he had to say about Apple’s plans to improve and expand Siri AI.

John Ternus says Apple plans to do “much more” with Siri AI, hinting at agent capabilities

Sometimes when Apple launches a new feature or product, the company sees its work as done and whatever is shipped remains unchanged for too long. Many could characterize Siri this way, arguing that the assistant has gone years without meaningful improvement or updates.

But according to Apple CEO John Ternus, the now-shipping Siri AI is just the beginning of what’s planned.

Yesterday at Apple’s quarterly earnings call, Ternus provided an overview of Siri’s AI capabilities. He concluded: “We’re really excited to have introduced all these innovations and there’s still a lot more we plan to do.”

This signals that Apple doesn’t see Siri AI as a feature it can now leave alone for a while. Instead, as we already saw in iOS 27.2 last week, Apple is focusing on improving it quickly.

What are these plans for the future? It seems that there may be agent abilities among them. Ternus said:

Thanks to Siri AI, we really do have the kind—the Siri we’ve always wanted. It’s primarily requirements-based today, but as we talked about at WWDC, it’s built on a modern orchestrator-driven architecture that gives us real room to grow the capabilities over time.

In terms of agent capabilities, we think these are promising tools for users. We just want to make sure users are aware of what they have access to. We want to ensure that this is done in a way that protects security and privacy. So, you know, we’re pushing Siri AI really hard, but we’re also really encouraged by the fact that we think Apple devices are the best places to use all forms of AI.

Tellingly, Ternus says that Siri is “primarily request-based today” and mentions “room for expanding capabilities” before turning to mention agent features. It looks like Apple is already devising and working behind the scenes on a version of Siri that won’t have to be “primarily request-based.”

Finally, later in the call when discussing opportunities for service growth, including the potential launch of new services, Ternus says, “We think news will be another opportunity as well.” This refers to an earlier discussion about Apple’s intention to charge a fee for extended limits on the use of certain Siri AI and Apple Intelligence features. The idea is that as Siri evolves and improves, Apple will have the opportunity to charge for certain features.

What are your takeaways from Ternus’ comments on Siri AI? Let us know in the comments.