Apple Intelligence will finally put AI in the hands of millions of people in just a couple of weeks. This are the three major impacts to AI engineers:

📌 Impact #1: AI will become a standard software experience. This will push massive app modernizations and redesigns, every iPhone user will raise the bar of what they expect from their software. AI engineers are the best positioned to deliver to those expectations.

📌 Impact #2: The largest AI experiment is about to begin. All Apple users will soon be exposed to thousands of hours of AI capabilities and limitations and will quickly become AI literate. This will also simplify AI engineers life, expectations will become much more realistic.

📌 Impact #3: Small models, edge/on-device AI and privacy will be major topics of conversation. This will remind everyone that we don’t need to use frontier models for 99% of all the real-world AI use cases that can deliver business value. Fine-tuned, small models trained with good quality highly relevant data are a much better and cost effective option today.

So how can you make the best of this?

📱#1 Understand and explain: Be ready to explain to your fellow humans what is AI doing behind the scenes and take the opportunity to exercise your storytelling skills.

📱#2 Compare: You will be able to make analogies and draw from AI examples and use cases that will be much more relatable to everyone.

📱#3: Be patient: Not all features will be available from Day 1, some may have to be quickly recalled after their release. This will give us all a good public case study of responsible AI release to quote as example.