Apple's productivity suite finally got the AI treatment — and Apple built a whole separate assistant to do it. According to 9to5Mac, new updates to Pages, Keynote, and Numbers on iOS introduce an "Intelligent Assistant" that lives inside the apps and understands the document you're working on, distinct from the Siri AI Apple has been rolling out everywhere else.
The pitch is document-aware help in each app. In Pages, the assistant can start a first draft, adjust tone, generate images and shapes from plain language, and search for up-to-date information to weave into the text. Keynote gets slide generation, presenter notes, and animation help from a prompt. Numbers gets the nerdy one: build complex formulas, get chart suggestions, and surface insights in your spreadsheet.
That's a lot of assistants. Apple is now effectively shipping parallel AIs — Siri AI for the system and an Intelligent Assistant for your work files — and the split tells you how fast the company is moving. Two years after the Apple Intelligence launch, iWork was still nearly AI-free while Microsoft's Copilot sat inside every Office app. This is Apple catching up, and doing it with a model tuned to document context rather than stretching Siri across everything.
The catch is access. The assistant is in beta, US English only, requires iOS 27 or later, and is reserved for Apple Creator Studio subscribers — Apple's creator-focused subscription bundle — rather than shipping to everyone with an iPhone. So the average Pages user gets nothing for now.
Buried in the same update is arguably the more surprising move: Keynote is getting a new Interchange Format (.keyx), which Apple describes as an open file format designed to make Keynote presentations easier to edit in other apps. Apple has historically guarded its proprietary formats; opening Keynote's is a quiet acknowledgment that presentations live in a world of PowerPoint and Google Slides, and users increasingly expect to move between them.
One wrinkle, per 9to5Mac's own testing: after updating all three apps, the Intelligent Assistant still hadn't appeared, which suggests a server-side activation Apple hasn't flipped yet. Ship the announcement, flip the switch later — an Apple classic.
The assistant itself may not matter as much as what it signals. Apple's AI strategy is no longer one assistant to rule them all. It's becoming a fleet of specialized helpers, each gated by subscription, platform, and language. The company that once sold "it just works" is now selling tiers of AI — and iWork users are paying to get on the list.
— via 9to5Mac