- A multi-year partnership between Apple and Google's Gemini aims to boost Siri
- Analyst Avi Greengart said Apple will push Google AI-enhanced versions of Siri deep into its ecosystem
- Analyst Anisha Bhatia said that Apple is partnering rather than building to move faster
Apple's multi-year AI deal to use Google's Gemini to enhance its Siri voice assistant and more will "see enhanced versions of Siri...pushed as deep into Apple's ecosystem as they can go," according to Techsponential Lead Analyst Avi Greengart.
The partnership with Google signals Apple’s intent to fast-track the long-promised overhaul of Siri’s core AI capabilities, which was first outlined two years ago but has yet to reach users at scale, said GlobalData Senior Technology Analyst Anisha Bhatia in a note on the deal.
How will Apple benefit?
"For Apple, partnering, rather than building an end-to-end AI proprietary model stack, could compress time-to-market and reduce execution risk by leveraging mature, already-deployed technology," Bhatia said.
The first Gemini-powered AI update to Siri should arrive sometime in 2026, according to our analyst contacts. Apple will likely benefit due to the "enhanced capabilities and deeper ties into Apple's ecosystem — including third-party apps," Greengart said. However, he said it's going to "take time even after the initial Apple Foundation Models have been updated."
As to whether not Apple will see a sales boost from the Google AI super-powered Siri, Greengart said, "It's hard to say that a future software update will immediately boost sales."
Despite the media kerfuffle over some Apple iPhone 17's AI features when it was launched, it wasn't really a drastically AI-enabled smartphone at launch, so there is little precedence as to how this partnership could impact device sales.
Still, the Gemini AI updates will spill across Apple's entire ecosystem, the analyst thinks. He said the updates — "silicon permitting" — will stretch as far as they can go. "There are memory and NPU limitations on older and lower-end devices that preclude using some on-device AI models on them," he notes.
What's the benefit to Google?
"For Google, the arrangement represents a material commercial upside — estimated at around $1 billion per year in revenue from Apple with further growth potential as enterprise and consumer AI adoption scales," GlobalData Bhatia wrote.
Deeper integration with Apple will strengthen Google’s distribution and monetization footprint at a time when competitive pressure is rising from the likes of OpenAI in this particular sector of the AI market, Bhatia noted.