Overview

• Apple has officially established its Answers, Knowledge and Information (AKI) team under senior director Robby Walker to develop an in-house answer engine capable of crawling the web and responding to general-knowledge queries.
• The project marks a strategic pivot from earlier reliance on OpenAI partnerships and internal skepticism about chatbot-style AI.
• Apple is evaluating both a standalone app and integration of the answer engine into Siri, Spotlight and Safari to extend conversational search across its ecosystem.
• The company has posted dozens of job listings in the United States and China seeking expertise in search algorithms and engine development to accelerate the engine’s rollout.
• Apple aims to close the gap with competitors such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini as it faces regulators examining its default Google search agreement.