Cook’s AI legacy at stake in final developer conference
Apple heads into next week’s Worldwide Developers Conference with its stock near record highs, iPhone momentum improving and one unresolved question hanging over Tim Cook’s final developer conference as CEO: Can Apple finally deliver the artificial intelligence experience it promised two years ago?
The expected centerpiece of WWDC is a major overhaul of Siri, Apple’s long-criticized voice assistant.
Analysts expect Apple to show a more powerful version of Siri with a standalone chatbot-style app, personal context, on-screen awareness, the ability to handle multi-step commands and deeper routing to outside models, potentially including Google’s Gemini.
For investors, WWDC is a test of whether Apple Intelligence can become a real iPhone upgrade driver — and justify a valuation that already assumes Apple can remain the device of choice for consumers accessing AI, regardless of which model they use.
For developers, it is a test of whether Siri can become a true platform in the agentic era, and one worth building for.
And for Cook, it is a legacy moment.
As John Ternus prepares to take over for Cook as CEO, WWDC gives the company one last major developer stage to show that Apple’s AI strategy is finally coming together.
Dan Newman, CEO of The Futurum Group, told CNBC that Apple Intelligence is “one of the big black eyes” of Cook’s tenure.
“This is clearly the moment that Apple can say, ‘Hey, we are capable of taking advantage of our multi-billion-user install base,'” Newman said, adding that Apple also needs to prove to developers that Siri is “something to build on.”
Winning developers and users
MoffettNathanson wrote this week that Apple’s stock has “done all the work the AI story has yet to do.”
The company enters WWDC at an all-time high, with about 36 times trailing earnings and $1.6 trillion more valuable than a year ago. The firm said Apple is executing exceptionally well, with the strongest iPhone cycle in years, China shifting from a structural worry to a share-gain story and services beating again.
“The question for WWDC26 isn’t ‘will Apple announce a better Siri?’ It almost certainly will,” MoffettNathanson wrote. “The question is ‘does a better Siri justify a multiple that already assumes it works?'”
MoffettNathanson said Siri has to become credibly agentic for the multiple to hold. That means Siri must move from a command portal into an assistant that can reliably execute multi-step tasks across apps.
But that depends on third-party developers making their apps work with App Intents, Apple’s system for letting Siri perform actions inside apps.
The firm said that creates a “chicken-and-egg problem.” Siri only becomes useful if enough developers support it, but developers may wait to see whether consumers actually use it before investing the work.
MoffettNathanson noted that Apple has reportedly lined up early App Intents partners, including Uber, Amazon, Temu, YouTube, WhatsApp, Facebook, Threads and AllTrails. But it warned that…
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