Unveiling Apple’s AI Strategy: The Power of Visual Intelligence

The rumor mill has been heating up in the past few weeks about Apple’s work on three new wearable AI devices, all of which are expected to be equipped with cameras to feed data into Apple Intelligence. That makes it little surprise that Apple’s really big play for these wearables won’t be primarily about interacting with Siri, but rather letting Apple’s AI interact with the world around you.

The writing for this seems to have been on the wall ever since Apple unveiled visual intelligence with the iPhone 16 a year and a half ago, but even that was an evolution of a powerful and useful machine learning feature that Apple had already unveiled in 2021: Visual Look Up.

In retrospect, Visual Look Up was clearly laying the groundwork for what would ultimately become the visual aspect of Apple Intelligence. The nascent technology could recognize and identify plants, animals, and landmarks, and Apple continued to expand it, adding recipe suggestions from food, laundry care symbols on clothing tags, and warning lights on car dashboards.

When Apple Intelligence came along in 2024, Visual Intelligence felt like an obvious evolution of that, moving from static photos to a live camera view and looping in ChatGPT to provide a more in-depth analysis. However, it was obvious from the start that OpenAI’s involvement in this was little more than a stopgap while Apple shored up its own AI technologies, and considering what Jony Ive and OpenAI are now up to and the new Apple-Google Gemini deal, it’s fair to say that could soon change — possibly even as soon as later this year when iOS 27 ships.

However, there’s another reason this shift could be coming sooner, rather than later. With Apple’s goal of putting cameras on smart glasses, AirPods, and even a new pendant/pin style accessory, it seemed clear that visual intelligence was being set up to play a much larger role, and with OpenAI likely working on a competing device, it’s fair to say that Apple isn’t going to be eager to let ChatGPT play in the same sandbox.

In this week’s Power On newsletter, Mark Gurman puts to rest any doubts that visual intelligence could be the single most important play for Apple’s new wearable AI devices by piecing together Tim Cook’s own oblique but revealing comments — and his habit of dropping similar hints before previous big product category launches.

For example, when Cook discussed wearable devices in a 2013 interview with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, he noted the “The wrist is interesting” as it’s the most natural place for a wearable device, while adding that “The whole sensor field is going to explode” and “will become clearer” over time. A little over a year later, he provided that clarity when he unveiled the first Apple Watch. While it took a few more years for the explosion of sensors to reach the wearable, it had a heart rate sensor on day one, and today it’s doing hypertension and sleep apnea detection.

While Cook was dismissive of smart glasses in that interview, which came at a time when Google Glass was viewed as a bit of punch line, a lot has changed in the twelve years since. In addition to the Vision Pro, which Cook dropped hints on as far back as 2016, Meta has proven there’s now a market for them, and Cook is reportedly “hell-bent” on ensuring Meta doesn’t gain more of a foothold in that market.

Enter Visual Intelligence

So, when Cook starts talking broadly about promising product categories, you can be confident that these are things Apple is working on. Some of this may simply be excitement for what’s coming, but like any good CEO, Cook is also enough of a strategist that he’s also tilling the marketing soil for Apple’s next big thing.

Cook has mentioned AI devices on several occasions, but one key aspect of its AI ambitions that keeps coming up is visual intelligence. While it wasn’t the first time, Cook singled out visual intelligence during Apple’s Q1 2026 earnings call, for instance:

This mantra was repeated during an all-hands internal meeting the following week, where Cook mentioned “new categories” of products enabled by AI, and added that Apple already has a “huge advantage” in the AI space with its 2.5 billion installed devices. When touting the biggest advantage of Apple Intelligence, he once again name-dropped visual intelligence.

Most of the big AI companies have been focusing on chatbots, research, and generative AI for videos and photos, which has left visual intelligence as a relatively unexplored area. However, that’s likely to change over the next couple of years.

Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses are one of the few mainstream hardware devices in this space, but those also come from a company with a sketchy track record on privacy, at best, so many folks are wary of buying into Meta’s vision and looking for more robust alternatives. While there’s little doubt that OpenAI is working on similar hardware with Jony Ive, Apple still has a home field advantage over both when it comes to its strict position on privacy — and we can pretty much guarantee that’s the marketing card it’s going to play when the new smart glasses, AI AirPods, and pendant hit the market in the next few months.