John Ternus talks plans to improve Siri AI

During Apple’s quarterly earnings call, CEO John Ternus was asked repeatedly about Siri AI’s future. Here’s what he said about Apple’s plans for improving and expanding Siri AI.

John Ternus says there’s ‘so much more’ Apple plans to do with Siri AI, hints at agentic capabilities

Sometimes when Apple launches a new feature or product, the company sees its work as finished, and whatever ships goes unchanged for far too long. Many might characterize Siri this way, arguing the assistant went years without meaningful improvement or updates.

But according to Apple CEO John Ternus, the Siri AI that just shipped is only the beginning of what’s planned.

Yesterday on Apple’s quarterly earnings call, Ternus gave a rundown of Siri AI’s capabilities. He concluded: “We’re really excited to have rolled all these innovations out, and there’s still so much more we plan to do.”

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

What are those future plans? It sounds like agentic capabilities may be among them. Ternus said:

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

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

It’s telling that Ternus says Siri is “primarily request-based today” and mentions “room to expand capabilities” before pivoting to mention agentic features. It sounds like Apple is already, behind-the-scenes, envisioning and working toward a version of Siri that won’t need to be “primarily request-based.”

Finally, later in the call when discussing opportunities for services growth, including potentially launching new services, Ternus says: “We think intelligence is going to be another opportunity as well.” This refers back to an earlier discussion of Apple’s intent to charge a fee for expanded usage limits on certain Siri AI and Apple Intelligence capabilities. The idea is that as Siri evolves and improves, Apple will have opportunities to charge for certain features.

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