During today’s fiscal Q1 2026 earnings call, Apple CEO Tim Cook and CFO Kevan Parekh fielded, albeit vaguely, questions regarding the recent deal to have Gemini power the next-gen Siri. Here’s what they said.

’Think of it as a collaboration’

Today’s fiscal Q1 2026 conference call had two main themes: memory constraints, and AI.

And while some questions focused on how Apple plans to monetize Apple Intelligence, others pressed executives on the technical and business aspects of the ‘collaboration,’ as Cook repeatedly put it.”

As expected, Apple declined to provide any specific details as to the terms of the deal. Still, Cook did share one piece of information that cleared up some of the confusion that followed Apple and Google’s initial joint announcement, as to where exactly the models would run:

  ●“We believe that we can unlock a lot of experiences and innovate in a key way due to the collaboration. We’ll continue to run on the device and run in Private Cloud Compute, and maintain our industry-leading privacy standards in doing so.“

Interestingly, Cook also mentioned that Apple will “obviously independently continue to do some of [its] own stuff,” but made it clear that Apple’s own in-house developments will not affect the Gemini deal:

  ●“The personalized version of Siri is a collaboration with Google.”

As to the question regarding Apple’s expected return on investment when it comes to Apple Intelligence, Cook said:

  ●Well, let me just say that we’re bringing intelligence to more of what people love and we’re integrating it across the operating system in a personal and private way. And I think that by doing so, it creates great value and that opens up a range of opportunities across our products and services. (…) And we’re very happy with the collaboration with Google as well.”

When asked about the percentage of iPhone users that currently have access to Apple Intelligence-powered features, and how much that is driving sales and upgrades, Cook and Parekh declined to comment.

Source: 9to5mac