Apple Prepares AI Shopping Assistant for Its Apple Store App

Apple is quietly preparing an AI-powered virtual shopping assistant for its Apple Store app. Traces of the feature, meant to help customers choose an iPhone, Mac, or iPad, turned up not in a marketing announcement but in an updated privacy policy for the app, first spotted by MacRumors.

What the Document Reveals

The updated privacy policy describes the assistant as a chat interface where users will be able to ask questions about Apple products and receive personalized recommendations. According to the document, the system will draw on account information, device identifiers, carrier data, the content of the conversation itself, and, if the user consents, location data.

In practice, this means the assistant won't give generic answers but will tailor hardware recommendations to a specific customer profile, for example suggesting an iPhone model based on the device the person currently uses and the country they're in.

Data Reaches Outside Partners

The most interesting part of the document concerns how conversations are processed outside Apple itself. The company states that before sharing data with outside partners, it strips out personal identifiers, and that the content is meant to be used solely to generate a conversational response.

Apple scrubs personal identifiers from it. These partners will use this information only to help Apple to provide a conversational response.

This wording suggests the feature could be powered by a third-party language model rather than solely by Apple's own Foundation models. The company hasn't named any partner, however, so for now this remains only an inference drawn from the document's language.

A Feature Not Yet Live

The way this information came to light is itself surprising. The Apple Store app was updated on July 22, but the new chat is nowhere to be seen in it. Yet the privacy policy already refers to a specific settings toggle, described as Account, Settings, Chat Improvements, which simply isn't in the interface yet.

This pattern, a legal document running ahead of an actual in-app feature, points to testing with a limited group of users or a stage just before public rollout. Apple has not officially commented on these reports.

Context for the Polish Market

For Polish Apple Store customers, what matters is that the company hasn't given a timeline or a list of launch markets, though analysts following the matter note that Apple's new conversational features typically arrive in English-speaking markets first. Apple already has a similar, though less elaborate, tool in its support app, where the Ask tab answers device-related questions using generative AI.

Rolling out a shopping assistant would be another step in Apple's push to embed chatbots directly into its sales channels, alongside the ongoing expansion of Apple Intelligence and Siri with language-model-based features. Unlike those changes, this one applies directly to the pre-purchase stage, the moment when a customer decides what hardware to buy.

The company also hasn't explained whether customers will be able to opt out of the assistant entirely without losing access to the app's other features, or how long conversation transcripts will be kept for business analytics purposes, something the document does confirm outright.