Siri AI and Image Playground will get all the hype, but Apple can actually make our lives better in Safari and Shortcuts.

Most of Apple’s current AI ideas are roughly the same as everyone else’s AI ideas. A chatbot you can ask questions; quick ways to create or summarize text; bizarre, borderline creepy image-generation tools. The company spent most of its WWDC keynote playing catch-up with the state of the AI art, announcing Siri features you can already find on Android phones and in the Claude and ChatGPT apps. The pitch, in so many cases, is just “this thing you know, but on your iPhone now.”

But a few minutes after I downloaded the first developer beta of iPadOS 26 (I didn’t want to risk it on my Mac or my iPhone, both of which are too important to my daily life to install one of Apple’s notoriously buggy and battery-crushing first betas), I found one of the few ways in which Apple can make a genuinely better AI product. I opened up the Shortcuts app, pressed the Plus button to create a new shortcut, and typed “Send a text to Anna with three kissy emojis.” This is a thing I do from time to time, just to let my wife know I’m thinking of her. A few Apple Intelligence-powered seconds later, the shortcut was up and running — I tapped it, and it sent the right emoji to the right Anna. Thank goodness.

Apple Shortcuts has always been a good idea in desperate need of a simpler interface. It’s a hugely powerful tool, essentially a way for users to visually create scripts that take actions automatically and across apps. But even creating simple shortcuts can be complex and brittle, and the app itself doesn’t exactly help you along. At WWDC, though, Apple touted AI as the way to make the app easier to use. Cecilia Dantas, a product marketing manager at the company, called the new system “more approachable than ever.”

In the first beta, it mostly doesn’t work. I haven’t successfully rigged up anything more complicated than texting emoji. I asked for a shortcut that would turn on Do Not Disturb automatically when I opened the Kindle app and instead just got a shortcut that turned on Do Not Disturb whenever I tapped the shortcut. I asked for one that would put my device into Do Not Disturb, and start a 30-minute timer with “Stop Playing” as the setting in the “When Timer Ends” section, but the key “Stop Playing” step didn’t work even after some follow-up requests. I asked for a shortcut that took a photo with the front camera, then the rear camera, then stitched them together side by side, and saved the result to the Photos app. Shortcuts understood all the steps correctly! And failed every time. Whenever I tried to make a shortcut that involved a third-party app, Shortcuts directed me back to the standard editor. It appears developers have some work to do to support the new feature.

Still, there is something about Shortcuts that feels like a model for implementing AI. It’s not flashy or overwrought, and it’s not AI as an entirely new revolutionary interface that will change how you do everything forever and just trust me bro AI is the new UI. It’s not trying to be creative or proactive, it’s there to do what AI actually does well: figure out what you’re asking for and navigate the databases to try and make it happen.