🟢 Should you steal Apple's "do nothing" AI strategy?
While we watch both Silicon Valley's AI frenzy and global corporate FOMO, we should maybe consider how Apple is waiting things out. For fifty years, they played a long game of letting new entrants flame out, while collecting rent. Let's discuss...
AI as a commodity?
Google currently pays Apple somewhere between $18 and $20 billion a year to be the default search engine on Safari. That arrangement is a trade-off calculation, balancing what it would cost to beat Google at its own algorithmic game against how much they can actually make by owning the moment when users decide to search, regardless of who is in charge of the algorithmic processes. The money flows because distribution creates value, and Apple tightly controls this bottleneck (they call it an iPhone).
The rumored future Siri/OpenAI arrangement follows precisely the same business model logic. Apple admittedly needs better AI than what Siri is capable of. But they need whoever's AI to run through their platform, and if OpenAI produces a better model next year, or Google does, Apple can renegotiate or switch suppliers without meaningful disruption to the user relationship it actually controls. The distribution layer is the real lock-in: iOS, the App Store, the hardware, and the ingrained habits of 1.4 billion active device users are the asset being protected. The AI model sitting underneath is a commodity input that can be replaced as the market matures.
