Big changes are coming to Apple in September, when Tim Cook will step down as CEO and will be replaced by hardware chief John Ternus.
While Cook has grown Apple into the world’s second-largest company by market capitalization, Wall Street expect Ternus to follow a different playbook for the artificial-intelligence era — one that focuses on more product innovation.
Investors wonder if Ternus will make bolder bets on new technologies, according to Bank of America analyst Wamsi Mohan. In a Thursday note, Mohan posed the question: “Will Apple move from a scale and execution era to one driven by AI innovation?”
The operations-focused Cook helped Apple become a consumer-electronics giant that can manage product cycles at massive scale. He also monetized Apple’s installed base through services such as Apple Pay, Apple Music and other offerings while emphasizing user privacy.
While Mohan expects “much of the core of Apple to remain unchanged under incoming CEO John Ternus,” there’s also an opportunity for Apple to take bigger risks than it has previously.
While other Big Tech companies have spent hundreds of billions of dollars on AI investments, Apple has chosen to wait and see instead of rushing to adopt new technology. In the AI era, this strategy has garnered criticism from investors who believe Apple is falling behind when it comes to things like the infrastructure build-out and platform innovation.
However, others argue that Apple’s more cautious AI strategy has made the company a diversified alternative to the large technology stocks that are spending much more heavily in pursuit of uncertain returns.
Apple appears to be on track to increase its spending, moving away from its historic net-cash neutral position earlier this year. In Mohan’s opinion, the move “could signal a period of higher investment” in research and development and even sizable mergers.
“The latter two have not been emphasized in the Tim Cook era but AI could require Apple to move with a higher rate of change when the speed of innovation is accelerating,” Mohan added.
Ternus will be tasked with integrating AI capabilities into Apple’s hardware and driving adoption of the technology across the installed base. At the same time, he will need to uphold the company’s focus on privacy and premium user experience.
The company’s Apple Intelligence and revamped Siri are finally coming to users this fall, two years after the AI features were initially announced. Apple’s installed base of over 2.5 billion devices offers a unique distribution advantage, but success hinges on the utility that AI features can provide for consumers in their everyday lives. An agentic Siri will need to go beyond chatbot capabilities to retrieve personalized context on devices and execute multistep workflows.
“Apple is already so large, profitable, and deeply embedded in its customers’ lives that incremental excellence may no longer be enough to redefine the company,” Mohan cautioned. “Ternus’s challenge will be to preserve the profitable machine Cook built while restoring a stronger sense of technological surprise.”
“By combining Apple silicon, on-device processing, privacy, operating systems, personal context, and a vast installed base, Ternus could cement Apple’s device dominance in an AI enabled era,” Mohan wrote.
