Apple's Next CEO Needs to Launch a Killer AI Product

Sometime in the next year or two, Apple’s new CEO, John Ternus, will step onto a stage and tell the world that his company has a revolutionary product. This product, he’ll say, will put the full and awesome power of AI into everyone’s hands. It probably won’t represent a breakthrough in AI research, and it might not let people automate work or perform tasks any better than a lot of technically minded people are doing today. It may or may not involve a new device, though if it doesn’t, one should be in development. But if it all works out, that keynote will mark the moment when Apple did to AI what it has done for desktop computers, the internet, mobile technology, wearables, and music distribution. That is, it’ll offer a solution to a troublesome technology that’s so delightful and right that it seems obvious in retrospect.

This isn’t optional for Ternus. While AI is clearly the future and millions of people use it, even more are suspicious of it. Powerful new AI agent technologies such as Claude Code and OpenClaw are still too risky or technical for most people to adopt. If Apple doesn’t decode this for the masses, someone else will. Current CEO Tim Cook, who announced this week that he’ll vacate his role in September and become the company board’s executive chairman, has done a superlative job guiding the company after Steve Jobs, but he left this important box unchecked. Apple Intelligence, rolled out with much fanfare in 2024, was underwhelming and uncompleted.

Can Ternus shepherd such a product? It’s hard to say, because the current SVP of hardware engineering has spent so much of his career out of the public eye. He only recently started doing more press interviews when it became apparent that he was the top candidate to assume Cook’s job. People see him as a methodical operator like Cook as opposed to a visionary like Jobs, but that might be because of a similar low-key demeanor. Maybe once he’s in the top job, he’ll be liberated to reach for the skies.

My own interactions with him have been sparse. A decade ago I spent a day at Apple’s Input Design Lab with him and his team. “I started in 2001 and have had the good fortune of working on many of our products throughout the years,” he told me by way of introduction. That day he got deep into the weeds on subjects like quantum dots, the environmental impact of cadmium, and the fact that “not all white light is created equal.” It was clear that he was likable; there was a lot of fun banter between him and his team.

Much more recently, I quizzed Ternus and global marketing head Greg Joswiak about Apple’s future, specifically its plans to get ahead of the AI transformation. Ternus acknowledged that AI is “an immense kind of inflection point,” but couched it as one of many leaps that Apple has navigated. Each hit product—the Apple II, the Mac, iTunes, the iPod, the iPhone, iPad—piggybacked on a previous product. “We never think about shipping a technology,” he said. “We want to ship amazing products, features, and experiences, and we don’t want our customers to think about what [underlying] technology makes it possible. That’s the way we think about AI.”

That’s fine, but I look back to the mid-2000s when everybody was waiting for Apple to come out with a phone. When Jobs finally delivered in January 2007, the product defined the mobile era. It’s a big ask for Ternus to do something similar for the AI age—but it’s an opportunity that must be seized. AI threatens to disrupt the entire iPhone ecosystem. By the end of this decade, it’s unlikely that people will swipe on their phones to tap on Uber or Lyft. They will just tell their always-on AI agent to get them home. Or that agent will have already figured out where they need to go, and the car will be waiting without the friction of a request. “There’s an app for that,” may be replaced by “Let the agent do that.”