Apple CEO Tim Cook tells staff AI is as big as the internet, vows major investment

Apple CEO Tim Cook held a rare all-hands meeting after the iPhone maker’s earnings to rally the company’s employees around artificial intelligence and its upcoming ‘amazing’ pipeline of products, according to a report by Bloomberg. Cook addressed Apple officials at the company’s on-campus auditorium where he told them that the AI revolution is “as big or bigger” than the internet, smartphones, cloud computing and apps. 

“Apple must do this. Apple will do this. This is sort of ours to grab,” Cook reportedly told his employees.

 “We will make the investment to do it.” He added.

Notably, Cook had also talked about Apple being ‘open’ to mergers and acquisitions during the company’s earnings call. Earlier reports have stated that Apple has internally discussed buying AI search startup Perplexity or France’s Mistral AI.

‘We’ve rarely been first’: Tim Cook tells Apple employees

Apple was months behind OpenAI, Alphabet, Microsoft and others in unveiling its Apple Intelligence features last year. Even after the announcement of these features, the company was not able to deliver them on time for the iPhone 16 launch while many of them also ran into controversy.

However, Cook didn’t seem too fazed by the patchy and delayed rollout of Apple Intelligence, telling the staffers, “We’ve rarely been first.”

“There was a PC before the Mac; there was a smartphone before the iPhone; there were many tablets before the iPad; there was an MP3 player before iPod,” Cook stated.

Apple, however, went on to create ‘modern’ versions of these product categories. “This is how I feel about AI,” he said.

During the hourlong address, Cook discussed a range of topics including the retirement of Apple COO Jeff Williams, increasing Apple TV+ viewership and advancements in health care features like AirPods’ hearing-aid technology. There were also talks about donations and community service by Apple employees, the iPhone maker’s goal to become carbon neutral by 2030 and the impact of regulations.

“The reality is that Big Tech is under a lot of scrutiny around the world,” Cook stated.

 “We need to continue to push on the intention of the regulation and get them to offer that up, instead of these things that destroy the user experience and user privacy and security,” he further added.