Apple CEO Tim Cook held an hour-long meeting with employees in which he made it clear: “Apple must win on AI. And it will.”

The event came shortly after a financial call to investors in which Cook announced that the company would significantly increase its investment in AI. During the internal meeting, he reiterated the same determination, emphasizing that AI is “territory that Apple must conquer,” Bloomberg reports.

Over the past year, the company has released a series of AI features under the Apple Intelligence brand, and key updates to its Siri virtual assistant have been delayed, but Cook seemed to acknowledge that Apple is lagging behind in this race.

“We are rarely first,” he said. “There were PCs before Macs, smartphones before iPhones, tablets before iPads, and MP3 players before iPods.”

According to him, this has never stopped Apple from reinventing existing technologies and creating “modern” versions of them that change the market.

The statement comes at a time of increasing competition in the AI industry, where companies such as Google, Microsoft and OpenAI have already set high standards. Apple is clearly preparing not just to catch up, but to enter the race with its usual strategic approach — to set a new standard. | BGNES