AI Still Searching for a Consumer Job, Asymco Says

Apple (AAPL) AI features are quality. They are not a business yet, Horace Dediu of Asymco said. AI is still a technology searching for a job to be done, he argued during a July 31 Office Hours Q&A.

Reviews of Apple's public betas have been positive since WWDC, Dediu said. The conversation then shifted to whether the features will move the needle or take too long to matter. He dismissed that framing. "None of this matters," he said. AI from a consumer point of view is still a technology searching for a job to be done.

Product-market fit has not arrived, Dediu said. "It has niches, and they're not consumers." Individual users and buyers exist, he said, but daily use is still early. "It doesn't have that resonance yet," he said. "It needs to be packaged in certain ways."

Dediu compared the trajectory to the smartphone camera. Nobody asked for three lenses or high quality, he said. Once it was available, people discovered uses and it became a killer app. He expects a similar path for AI.

Apple's initial AI features include emoji generation, image editing, and Siri enhancements. Dediu called these features, not apps. "The app is not a technology, it's not a feature. It's something that packages all those things, and does it in a way that's easy to discover and to evolve," he said.

The difficulty for Apple, Dediu said, is that testing is hard because the number of possible queries is indefinite. Modularizing the problem is not easy. Maintaining high quality across all use cases, which Apple demands, makes it harder.

Siri is a natural application for the latest AI technologies, Dediu said. Usage may rise. "But that's not a business," he said. "Siri is a feature."

Dediu's comments came during a July 31 Office Hours session open to Asymco One subscribers. The full Q&A is available on the Asymco site.