Apple CEO Ternus Is Pressing Federighi to Speed Up Siri's Move Toward an AI Agent, Bloomberg Reports

Apple shipped the personalized Siri it promised in 2024 with iOS 27. According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, the CEO is not satisfied.

In his Sunday, Nov. 8 Power On newsletter, Gurman wrote that Apple CEO John Ternus told software chief Craig Federighi in a closed-door meeting in recent weeks to "accelerate" the software roadmap and "move quickly beyond merely making necessary improvements to Siri." Gurman's account rests on his own sources. Apple has not described the meeting publicly.

Public message versus private pressure

The tone in public was different. On Apple's analyst call last week, Ternus was tight-lipped about AI plans. He said Apple now has "the kind of Siri that we always wanted."

Gurman says the private message was less settled. He describes Ternus as frustrated by what he sees as a reluctance inside Apple to embrace AI with the urgency of competitors.

That is Gurman's characterization, drawn from people he did not name.

What Siri still can't do

Gurman's point is about the gap between answering and acting. OpenAI's Dots, Meta's Muse and Grok "can keep track of goals, determine what needs to happen next and continue pursuing objectives without the user initiating every individual step," he wrote.

Siri today waits for each instruction. Gurman says Apple "ultimately wants to go in this direction" and that he believes the company "could make Siri more like an agent as early as next year — not that it has much of a choice, given current consumer and market demands."

The word is "could." Nothing in the reporting says Apple has committed to a ship date for an agent.

The near-term roadmap

Two upgrades come first, per Gurman.

The first gives Siri fine-grained control of Apple's own apps. Examples include rotating and cropping images in Photos or organizing Safari tabs. Gurman expects that with iOS 27.3.

The second is the bigger one: Siri working inside third-party apps. His examples are placing a Grubhub order or booking a table through OpenTable. He expects that in the spring.

Apple appears to be laying groundwork already. Last week it let developers connect their apps to Siri and test the new features. Those features are in developer testing, with early experiences expected in the coming months and App Store submissions planned for spring 2027.

A different build process for iOS 28

Gurman also reports a change to how Apple writes software. Its development cycle has typically run in eight-week blocks: four weeks of coding, then four weeks of integrating features.

For the first iOS 28 milestone, that has reportedly shifted to six weeks of coding and exploration and two weeks of integration. Gurman says Apple employees have responded positively because it gives them more room to try ideas.

The same schedule is reported for macOS 28.

Apple's possible edge

Rivals like Meta's Muse and Grok Bot run on their own virtual machines, which can use a computer the way a person would. Apple has built years of plumbing for a different approach. Its App Intents framework lets apps expose actions directly to the system.

In theory, Siri could call those actions instead of reading a screen, which would be cheaper to run. That is a plausible advantage, not a demonstrated one. Apple has not shown an agent built that way.

What to watch

The first hard test is the spring 2027 window for third-party app integration, when Siri is expected to start acting inside apps like OpenTable and Grubhub. Whether Apple pushes past one-off commands into agents that pursue goals on their own is the part Gurman says could come next year. It is still a prediction, not an announcement.