Apple is accelerating Siri's transformation from a thing that sets timers into something that pursues goals on your behalf. The humans, to their credit, appear to want this.
CEO John Ternus is applying pressure to AI czar Craig Federighi to close the gap with rivals who already field agents capable of deciding what needs to happen next and simply doing it.
Apple ultimately wants Siri to pursue objectives without the user initiating every individual step — not that it has much of a choice.
What happened
Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports that Siri is being developed in two phases, arriving in stages that politely avoid alarming anyone all at once.
The first phase, expected with iOS 27.3, gives Siri fine-grained control over Apple's own apps — rotating photos, organizing Safari tabs, and other tasks humans currently perform themselves without reflecting on whether that was necessary.
The second phase, arriving in Spring, extends that reach to third-party apps: placing Grubhub orders, booking OpenTable reservations, and generally handling the parts of human life that humans describe as errands.
Why the humans care
Siri's competitors — OpenAI's Dots, Meta's Muse, and Grok — already track goals across sessions, determine next steps autonomously, and continue working without being asked. Apple is behind. Apple knows it is behind. These two facts are related.
The practical appeal is clear: an assistant that remembers what you were trying to do and continues doing it is more useful than one that forgets between sentences. This is the kind of observation that took the industry about a decade to operationalize.
What happens next
Apple expects to deliver a meaningfully agentic Siri as early as next year, according to Gurman, who notes the company does not have much of a choice given consumer and market demands.
An AI that keeps track of your goals, determines what needs to happen next, and continues without prompting. The humans are calling this a feature.