Microsoft and Apple agree: AI is a feature, not a product
You should be asking: Is AI an ingredient or is it a dish?
A new question has recently emerged in the fundamental debate over AI. In restaurant menu terms, is AI more of an ingredient or a dish?
Interestingly, while we've been buried under buzz about apps like ChatGPT, Claude, and Google Gemini, Microsoft and Apple seem to have decided that AI is indeed best pitched as a feature, not a standalone product.
In other words, while you might legitimately shy away from using a one-off AI app like ChatGPT to write a cover letter for your resume or a book report for school, you might be more open to using built-in rewriting and editing functions in Google Docs or Microsoft Word, even if they're AI-powered.
We've seen this in two distinct recent launches. Microsoft's Copilot Plus PCs add a lot of new AI features to Windows, but the Copilot chatbot built into Windows 11 is the least interesting of the bunch.
For example, Cocreator takes your rough sketches and improves them, getting more imaginative as you slide a creativity slider from left to right. It's a fun tool that might actually be useful if you don't want to use fully AI-generated art or stock imagery—and you also can't really draw.
What I find especially amusing about Cocreator is that it's not a standalone app but instead built into Microsoft's underappreciated Paint program, truly the Clippy of art apps.
Both Paint and the Windows Photos app (also rarely used, at least by me) can generate fully original images from text prompts. Other new Windows tools like Live Captions and Recall are built around some level of AI but don't necessarily use that as their main selling point.
That said, I think Microsoft is making a mistake in locking much of the utility of using AI with Office apps behind a separate Copilot Pro subscription (not to be confused with Copilot Plus, the company’s line of AI-ready computers). You need to subscribe to both Office 365 and Copilot Pro, but the rules and availability are different for home and work versions of Office. It's all more confusing than it should be.
Apple, at around the same time, announced that AI actually stands for "Apple Intelligence," which is cringy and clever at the same time. More importantly, there's no singular Apple Intelligence app—unless you maybe count Siri. Instead, AI will just be baked into the feature set of existing apps. Again, it’s an ingredient, not a dish.
Rather than having conversations with bots or creating fan art, both companies are taking what I consider a smart, long-term approach. AI is there to help apps talk to each other or help you find photos and files more easily. This AI-as-feature mindset, rather than the AI-as-product one, is how AI will end up baked into anything and everything, as inseparable as your GPU or web browser from the overall computer experience.
The AI addendum
I asked three AI chatbots for their opinions on this feature-vs-product topic. The answers were less than impressive. This reinforces the idea that AI tools are better for searching files, cleaning up existing work, improving webcam feeds and other behind-the-scenes tasks, rather than being public-facing avatars.
Claude gave me a keyword-packed essay that read like a trade magazine article, but everything about it felt either vague or out-of-date.
ChatGPT invented a hallucinated joint announcement from Microsoft and Apple, complete with fake quotes (!) from Tim Cook and Satya Nadella.
Gemini offered a broad, bland statement but got hung up on only considering Microsoft's Copilot as a part of Office 365 rather than a larger part of the Windows 11 ecosystem.
This further convinces me that you can still easily spot most AI writing, filled as it is with cliches, fake info and repetitive phrasing. So maybe even humble newsletter writers like myself can't be replaced quite so easily.