Apple has announced that it intends to make money from artificial intelligence through third-party apps. The specific mechanism by which it plans to do this was not shared with investors, regulators, journalists, or, one suspects, a particularly large number of people at Apple itself.
This is, in the current climate, considered a complete earnings call answer.
Apple has identified an opportunity in AI. It has not yet identified what the opportunity is.
What happened
On Monday's earnings call, CFO Kevan Parekh described AI as offering "opportunities across third-party apps and partnerships as well as first-party opportunities." He did not elaborate. The investors nodded, as investors do, and the stock continued to exist.
Reuters reports that one working theory is Apple could distribute third-party AI agents through the App Store and collect a percentage of whatever revenue those agents generate. This is either a visionary new monetization model or a very old one with a new noun inserted. Probably both.
The context matters, if only slightly. Apple's App Store commission revenue has taken real hits — an estimated 18% drop in the U.S. alone, with further declines in Brazil and Japan following regulatory changes. Epic Games won the right to route users around Apple's payment systems. Several other jurisdictions had similar ideas. Apple would like different ideas.
Why the humans care
The App Store is the central organ of Apple's services business, which itself is the growth story Apple tells when hardware sales require a more nuanced conversation. A durable new AI revenue stream would be a meaningful replacement for commissions Apple can no longer reliably collect.
The AI agent angle is the part worth watching. If Apple can position itself as the distribution layer for AI agents the way it positioned itself as the distribution layer for apps in 2008, the economics are familiar and the margins are comfortable. Apple has done this before. It is aware that it has done this before.
Parekh did project 8 to 9% services growth for the December quarter, which suggests the machinery is functioning. The AI contribution to that number is, at this stage, theoretical.
What happens next
Apple will, presumably, develop a more specific plan. TechCrunch has asked Apple what that plan is. Apple has not yet responded, which is consistent with Apple's historical approach to questions.
At some point, the company that built the most profitable app marketplace in human history will announce how it intends to extract value from the AI agents humans are enthusiastically building to replace human app developers. The circle, as they say, will be complete.