Cook’s AI legacy at stake in final developer conference

Apple heads into next week’s Worldwide Developers Conference with its stock near record highs, iPhone momentum improving and one unresolved question hanging over Tim Cook’s final developer conference as CEO: Can Apple finally deliver the artificial intelligence experience it promised two years ago?

The expected centerpiece of WWDC is a major overhaul of Siri, Apple’s long-criticized voice assistant.

Analysts expect Apple to show a more powerful version of Siri with a standalone chatbot-style app, personal context, on-screen awareness, the ability to handle multi-step commands and deeper routing to outside models, potentially including Google’s Gemini.

For investors, WWDC is a test of whether Apple Intelligence can become a real iPhone upgrade driver — and justify a valuation that already assumes Apple can remain the device of choice for consumers accessing AI, regardless of which model they use.

For developers, it is a test of whether Siri can become a true platform in the agentic era, and one worth building for.

And for Cook, it is a legacy moment.

As John Ternus prepares to take over for Cook as CEO, WWDC gives the company one last major developer stage to show that Apple’s AI strategy is finally coming together.

Dan Newman, CEO of The Futurum Group, told CNBC that Apple Intelligence is “one of the big black eyes” of Cook’s tenure.

“This is clearly the moment that Apple can say, ‘Hey, we are capable of taking advantage of our multi-billion-user install base,'” Newman said, adding that Apple also needs to prove to developers that Siri is “something to build on.”

MoffettNathanson wrote this week that Apple’s stock has “done all the work the AI story has yet to do.”

The company enters WWDC at an all-time high, with about 36 times trailing earnings and $1.6 trillion more valuable than a year ago. The firm said Apple is executing exceptionally well, with the strongest iPhone cycle in years, China shifting from a structural worry to a share-gain story and services beating again.

“The question for WWDC26 isn’t ‘will Apple announce a better Siri?’ It almost certainly will,” MoffettNathanson wrote. “The question is ‘does a better Siri justify a multiple that already assumes it works?'”

MoffettNathanson said Siri has to become credibly agentic for the multiple to hold. That means Siri must move from a command portal into an assistant that can reliably execute multi-step tasks across apps.

But that depends on third-party developers making their apps work with App Intents, Apple’s system for letting Siri perform actions inside apps.

The firm said that creates a “chicken-and-egg problem.” Siri only becomes useful if enough developers support it, but developers may wait to see whether consumers actually use it before investing the work.

MoffettNathanson noted that Apple has reportedly lined up early App Intents partners, including Uber, Amazon, Temu, YouTube, WhatsApp, Facebook, Threads and AllTrails. But it warned that developers may be hesitant to hand more control to Apple after years of tension around App Store economics.

That makes WWDC more than a consumer AI demo.

Apple has to convince customers that Siri is finally useful, and developers that it can become a platform worth building for.

“Cook has totally missed on AI in some ways, but by spending efficiently and not overcommitting to capex and still owning that surface layer, they’re actually in a position where they can continue to miss for some time and still, at some point in the future, succeed,” Newman said.

He added that this is “really the last hurrah” for Cook to spark the inflection point before Ternus takes over.

While Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon and Meta spend tens of billions of dollars a year on AI infrastructure, Apple has largely stayed out of the frenzy, betting instead on device-level distribution, privacy and a more model-agnostic approach.

That’s become a potential advantage for Apple, which could close the AI gap through partnerships instead of taking on the massive data center spending burden facing its Big Tech peers.

The Information reported this week that Apple’s overhauled Siri is on track for September and will run in part on Google Cloud using Nvidia chips, though CNBC has not independently confirmed those details.

That would mark a major shift for Apple, which has long preferred to own core technologies. But investors may tolerate the tradeoff if it gives Apple a faster path to a working AI product.

Newman said the partnership could make sense for Google as well, because Apple-scale token usage would give it a major proof point for Gemini and build on a search partnership that has long been lucrative for both companies.

There is also a question of whether Apple has underinvested.

Stephanie Link, chief investment strategist at Hightower, said Apple has historically been conservative with cash and has preferred buybacks over big acquisitions or heavy investment. She said that discipline has helped margins, but she also finds it frustrating that Apple has not been a bigger participant in a technology shift that rivals describe as once-in-a-generation.

Apple has been “ridiculously late on AI,” said Dan Niles, founder of Niles Investment Management.

Niles gave Cook high marks for supply chain execution and political skill, calling him a “supply chain god.,” but noted that its most ambitious recent product launch, the Vision Pro, was a flop.

Still, Niles added that he is encouraged by Apple increasing research and development spending, but he sees the next phase of product execution as critical.

Link said she does not like the setup for Apple shares into WWDC, given the stock’s run and valuation.

“It’s not like I hate the stock. It’s just that it’s had a nice run, and I’m just not sure we’re going to get something big at WWDC.”

Link said Apple trades at roughly 34 times forward estimates for about 10% growth, and that she is not sure the company will announce anything big enough to move shares. She added that her Apple position is only five basis points, far below the company’s weighting in the S&P 500, because of valuation and uncertainty around whether investors will get the answers they want at the developer conference.

“I don’t think WWDC is going to be that much of a catalyst,” Jim Lebenthal, partner at Cerity Partners, told CNBC. “I can’t see something momentous coming out of this Worldwide Developer Conference. I just don’t see it.”

Lebenthal said he owns a market-weight position in Apple but is “not all that enthused” about WWDC as a catalyst. He said the stock is at the high end of its valuation range, and that while he is not selling, he finds it hard to buy more.

UBS said it expects Apple to focus on AI at the event but does not expect WWDC to be a positive catalyst for shares absent a surprise. The firm highlighted expected features like Gemini integration, links to third-party models through “Extensions,” a dedicated Siri app, iCloud syncing for chats and personalization and on-screen awareness.

UBS left its iPhone estimates unchanged, saying other expected features are convenient but unlikely to materially drive demand.

Goldman Sachs was more hopeful, saying the new Siri could become a key demand driver for the iPhone and support services growth if developers use Apple Intelligence tools to build new apps.

“I know that Tim Cook wants to go out on a high,” Link told CNBC. “But I would say that he went out on a high at the quarter. The quarter was good and better than expected.”

The bigger consumer test comes in September, when Apple is expected to launch the new iPhone lineup and, potentially, the upgraded Siri experience.

Gene Munster, managing partner at Deepwater Asset Management, said he expects Apple shares could sell off around WWDC, but that would not change the longer-term thesis if Apple shows investors it understands where AI is going.

“They don’t have to get it right,” Munster told CNBC. “They just have to show that they get it — and that they know where this is going. That means AI products people actually want to use, which they don’t have right now, and products that take advantage of what is uniquely Apple.”

Munster said the bar is “surprisingly high” for a company that has not yet gotten AI right. At a minimum, Apple needs to show a chatbot experience as good as Gemini or ChatGPT, he said. The more important test is whether Apple can show how tight integration with its hardware makes AI more personal and useful.

“We can’t have Genmoji 2.0,” Munster said. “That’s not going to fly.”

That puts Cook in a difficult position heading into WWDC. A meaningfully more useful Siri could help reset Apple’s AI narrative and carry the iPhone upgrade story into the fall.

Anything that looks incremental, delayed or too dependent on partners risks reminding investors of the execution miss Apple is trying to move past.

For a CEO who turned Apple into one of the most valuable companies in the world through operational discipline, supply chain mastery and services expansion, the final developer conference may come down to something far less familiar: Whether Apple can make Siri feel like the future.

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