Apple Builds AI Into Pages, Keynote and Numbers

Apple has rarely rushed to put generative AI at the front of its products. This week it moved a step closer. The company said it is adding an AI assistant to Pages, Keynote and Numbers, the apps in its iWork suite, letting people draft a document, build a slide deck or make sense of a spreadsheet by asking for it in plain language.

The assistant can also pull in current information from the web and explain the apps' more advanced features, according to 9to5Mac. At launch it works only in US English and needs a device new enough to run Apple Intelligence, on iOS 27 or iPadOS 27 or later.

There is a cost. The new features sit behind an Apple Creator Studio subscription, which runs 12.99 dollars a month or 129 dollars a year in the United States. The basic versions of the apps stay free, so this is an upsell for people who want the assistant, not a change to what Pages and Keynote already do.

The interesting wrinkle is whose technology does the work. Apple's own support documentation notes that the Generate Presentation feature in Keynote is powered by OpenAI, while other generation features run on Google Cloud. Apple says information sent to those outside providers is not linked to a person's Apple Account. For a company that has built much of its brand on keeping data on the device, leaning on two outside AI firms is a notable concession to how far behind it would otherwise be.

The move drops Apple into a fight already underway. OpenAI recently added a slide-building tool to ChatGPT and has been pushing into the territory of traditional office software, and its latest model, GPT-6.1 Terra, is aimed squarely at getting work done inside other applications. Apple's edge is distribution. Pages, Keynote and Numbers already sit on hundreds of millions of devices, and a built-in assistant does not need to win a download to get tried.

The features are expected to arrive in November. Whether people will pay 13 dollars a month for an assistant inside apps they have long used for free is the test Apple has set itself.