Bloomberg SCOOP: Apple is Working on Perplexity Competitor... What's this Mean for Agentic Commerce?!
Apple is the dark horse everyone is counting out in Agentic Commerce. Today we learned a LOT more about what they are up to.
Apple Enters the Arena?
In a recent meeting with a large retailer to share our thinking on Agentic Commerce strategies, a senior exec asked: “I get the Six Agentic Commerce Engines you’re talking about, but who is the dark horse in all this nobody is thinking about?”
My one word answer: Apple
Bloomberg Drops a 💣
Over the weekend, Bloomberg dropped a bombshell that Apple is working on their own search engine that Bloomberg has branded as a “Perplexity and ChatGPT competitor”.
Let’s dig into why this could be a huge move and carefully parse through Bloomberg’s Scoop.
Retailgentic Agentic Shopping Engine Framework
Long time readers will remember these, but we’ve been adding a lot of readers lately so here’s a quick recap. If you want to go deeper, here’s the OG post.
Agentic Shopping Engine Players
First, here’s our ‘tracker’ for the status of all the players in the space:
Here you’ll see we’ve been predicting Apple will enter the game eventually. There’s also a new addition here where we’re starting to track some of the vertical (meaning category oriented). There’s a post coming up on that and some more podcasts, stay tuned.
5 Levels of Agentic Shopping Framework
Those are the players, but how do we track their status? With the 5 Levels of Agentic Shopping Autonomy:
Here’s where we are today:
Based on announcements by the company’s (not leaks/press reports like this Bloomberg report or the ChatGPT/Financial Times report), here’s where I think we’ll end up for Holiday 2025:
Apple’s Assets They Bring to The Arena
In addition to Apple’s vast financial assets ($3.5T market cap, $36B in cash). Apple brings a huge digital commerce war chest to the Agentic Commerce Wars:
~150m US users of iphone (57% share, more like 85%+ share retail wallet when you look at the mobile device ecommerce stats)
Apple Pay globally has over 640m users, is accepted at 85% of all retailers, and processes an estimated $7..6-10t globally
54% of all in store digital wallet ‘taps’
Then if you look back at the 5 Levels of Agentic commerce - to get to Level 5: Full Autonomy, an agent is going to need access to some pretty private information:
Past Purchase history
Loyalty information
Wallet
Bill to/shop to/contact info
Geo location
Email and calendar
Possibly more.
All of this is sensitive information and Apple’s entire focus on security and privacy, storing this information in a local secure and encrypted enclave on your phone is very unique, BUT that makes it impossible for a third-party Commerce agent to get to it, unless….it’s Apples and you give it permission. For this to work and stay secure, you want a model that runs locally, or ‘on the edge’ as we call it. Wow if only Apple had some technology in this exact area of AI…
Oh yeah, Apple’s been working on this for a while - link here if you want to read the paper.
THIS is why Apple is the dark horse in my book. They have all the ingredients, but until now, Chef Tim Cook didn’t seem to have any desire to put them together…
Digging into the Bloomberg Piece
This piece is very lengthy and detailed but, sadly, it’s behind a paywall. We’ll fill you in on the pieces that are applicable to our Agentic world. Before we jump in, it’s helpful to know a bit about the reporter. I’m a super Apple nerd - I’ve got you on this.
Who is Mark Gurman (at Bloomberg)
(These guys have similar names and I’ve found it helpful to remember their venue to avoid confusion).
Prior to , the inside scoops on notoriously tight-lipped and secretive Apple, came from Jon Gruber at Daring Fireball. Fun fact for all you AI enthusiasts, Gruber created the Markdown language.
Then somewhere around 2018/2019, at least for me personally, Gurman/Bloomberg surpassed Gruber/Fireball in reading the Apple tea leaves. Gurman/Bloomberg started at 9to5mac and in 2016 moved to Bloomberg where he really blossomed. He was super early on Apple silicon and really started getting more Apple scoops like the Vision Pro, etc.
I say all of this to make the point - Gurman/Bloomberg has a strong success rate and given the meatiness of the reporting, this feels like it’s a > 80% probability. The biggest open question is timing.
The Goodies Gurman Has Dug Up
Here’s what we learned:
Apple considered acquiring Mistral (French SOTA LLM) and Perplexity
They’ve decided on a different path
They’ve talked to ChatGPT, Anthropic and Gemini about a custom trained LLM and Gurman reports Gemini is the current leading candidate
The main use of this AI Search engine would be the upgraded Siri coming Spring 2026. Specifically - you know how Siri has to punt sometimes and say, I need to check the web for that and calls out to Google today? That’s where this would kick in I imagine.
It would/could eventually move to Safari or tied to other actions
It’s called World Knowledge Answers (WKA) internally. Some executives just call it Answer Engine
The UI will have text, photos, video and local points of interest graphical elements injected (Product cards anyone - feels ripe for that).
Craig Federighi (If you’ve seen any Apple launches you’ll recognize the name - he’s their head software exec) said at an internal meeting about the Siri AI upgrade: “The work we’ve done on this end-to-end revamp of Siri has given us the results we needed,” he said. “This has put us in a position to not just deliver what we announced, but to deliver a much bigger upgrade than we envisioned.”
The idea is to make Siri and Apple’s operating systems a place where users can look up information from across the internet — in a similar fashion to ChatGPT, AI Overviews in Google Search and a crop of new apps.
- Mark Gurman, Bloomberg
Retailgentic WKA and Agentic Commerce Predictions
Here’s my prediction. The Bloomberg piece doesn’t say anything about Agentic Commerce, but here’s the dominoes that will fall into place between now and Holiday 2026 - you can bookmark this post and call me out if I’m wrong or give me some high-fives if I’m right.
Holiday 25 - ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini all released Level 3 or 4 of Agentic Commerce. ChatGPT revenue soars on the back of the hosted checkout collecting (ChatGPT marketplace) and this not go unnoticed.
Spring 26 - WKA v1 in Siri comes out, Perplexity, Grok, Gemini, Copilot, Anthropic all come out with hosted checkouts. Maybe Meta, let’s see if they can get their act together.
Fall 26 - WKA v2 is out with the September phones and iOS 27 featuring Agentic Shopping and an Apple Pay powered checkout experience.
Apple will miss Holiday 2025, but will be ready for Holiday 2026 which will be fine because that’s when Agentic Commerce goes from < 10% to 15-20%+ of transactions.
Scot do you not see Walmart getting into the mix as well? I know some of the projects they have worked on, so was curious if you see them as a player?