Apple’s WWDC: The AI Comeback Investors Are Hoping For?
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As companies create AI-powered solutions, how can they ensure they're effective and trustworthy? Join IBM at the break to hear how companies can build trust in their AI with Hrithika Gunnar, IBM's General Manager for Data and AI.

Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Tuesday, June 10th. I'm Victoria Craig for The Wall Street Journal. Investors were itching for a blockbuster breakthrough in AI at Apple's annual developer conference. Has the tech titan delivered? Then, toolkits for build-your-own cyber hacks are booming. What are they and how do you know if you have become a target?

But first, huge developments, mind-blowing releases, and a project that only comes once a decade. That is how Apple described a number of new software updates announced at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference yesterday. But it all added up to incremental updates across Apple's devices. And that was...

wasn't exactly what Apple Watchers were hoping for from this year's WWDC. WSJ personal tech columnist Nicole Nguyen is at the conference in Cupertino, California. Nicole, an AI-powered Siri is really what a lot of people had been hoping to see Apple unveil, but that just wasn't in the cards. Instead, we got a number of more modest developments. Why is that? Well,

Siri was not even mentioned this year, and that's because Apple a few months ago said that it wasn't up to par and it didn't meet the mark. So we'll see delays for that feature. And we were hoping for a timeline update, but we didn't get one. It's interesting to note what Apple didn't talk about, which is all of the AI buzzwords that you've heard recently. Agentic AI, AI search,

Video generation, deep research. Apple is not ready to talk about those things or launch features related to those, but its competitors won't shut up about them. We did, however, get a new visual design language called Liquid Glass that covers all of Apple's devices.

Its buttons are rounder, the icons look more transparent than before, but in reality it means that now each device will feel more similarly to the next. It also means that people will probably need to relearn how to use some parts of their phones because settings and options where you expect them will probably be in a different place come this fall when the software is launched.

And this liquid glass was called the kind of project that only comes once in a decade and that the stage is now set for something new. So does this maybe preview something that is set to come? Or how big of a deal really is this liquid glass update? Because Apple seems very proud of it. I will say liquid glass does not come with very many life-changing updates. This is more a fresh coat of paint. But like I said...

Things will be moving to different places. So certain settings, certain options where you expect them will be hidden under different taps, different swipes. So you will have to learn new parts of your phone. Ten years ago, when Apple launched iOS 7, which was the last big redesign, people were really upset because change is hard after you've spent many years learning how to do one thing one way on your phone. So I expect that will be the same this year.

So change is hard for users, but one thing that they might delight in is some of the artificial intelligence integrations to a lot of the apps and features that they use daily already on an iPhone or an Apple Watch. Can you walk us through some of those things?

One of the new features that we'll be shipping this fall is on-device live translation, which takes a page from Google and Samsung. You know, those Android phones already do some of this, but there's a different iteration in the iPhone now. In messages, this means that texts will be delivered in the recipient's system language. So if Apple detects that you are receiving a text in Spanish, but your system and preferred language is English, it will automatically translate that to English. And for your

Textees display

Your English text will be translated automatically into Spanish. And this same feature also appears in FaceTime as subtitles below the video call and on a phone call, even with calls with people who aren't using iPhones, you'll also hear translations live as you speak with the other person. There is a delay though, at least there was in the demo, so it'll be really interesting to hear and see what that sounds like. Another feature is what's called on-screen visual intelligence. So

Currently, if you use your camera and point it at, say, a leaf because you want to identify a plant, then Apple intelligence can take over and tell you what kind of leaf it is.

Now you can screenshot something that's on your screen already, so not through your camera, and analyze what's in there and either create a calendar event or ask Chachabiti, what is this? Or I really like this lamp that I saw on social media. Can you find me ones that look just like it? That's Apple playing catch up with what is available on Android, but I think a lot of people will think that this is a good idea.

is a handy use of AI on their phone. Now, Tim Cook ended the conference by saying it'll be a, quote, big week. What can we expect from the rest of the planned events at WWDC? It is a developers conference. And so Apple will really will be trying to sell these app makers on its new capability for app makers, which is that Apple is allowing access to its on-device language models to third-party apps.

So for example, we saw this hiking app, AllTrails, with a new chatbot experience. So even if you're camping off the grid, you can ask

all trails. I'm looking for this kind of view and this level of difficulty, and it'll spit out a route based on one of these Apple-produced AI models. We don't really understand the full scope of possible applications, but Apple will spend a lot of this week trying to sell developers on using this tech so that their experience on the iPhone

and that they'll stay on the App Store platform. That was WSJ personal tech columnist Nicole Nguyen. Coming up, an illegal startup in a box for cyber criminals. How to protect yourself from increasingly prolific DIY hackers. After the break.

Enterprise AI is an unstructured data problem at scale. How does generative AI address it? Rithika Gunnar, General Manager for Data and AI at IBM, explains. Think of this as emails, PDF, PowerPoint decks that sit in an organization. Generative AI has allowed us to unlock the

opportunity to be able to take the 90% of data that is buried in unstructured formats, which really unlocks a new level of driving data and insights of that data into your workflows, into your applications, which is essential for organizations as we go forward.

By now, we all know to be wary of so-called phishing scams, which are designed to steal online login credentials, credit card numbers, and other personal information. Now, those phishing scams have been turned into a subscription-style business by cybercriminals. It lowers the barrier to entry and leverages the power of AI to make attacks faster and more effective.

Angus Loughton, who writes about cybersecurity for The Wall Street Journal, has been digging into this latest innovation in the scam. Angus, what is phishing, and in particular, phishing as a service? Phishing is the low-tech end of cybercrime because phishing

You're not trying to get in past the kind of digital fortifications that a business has put up. You're really trying to bait someone into letting you in the front door. And you do that with an email that looks really familiar and looks really trustworthy or even an entire web page. So that's basically what phishing is. Phishing as a service is selling you these prefab tools to make these convincing emails and convincing web pages.

And much like legitimate cloud providers, they're charging you a subscription. So rather than buying the kit straight out, you're getting an annual subscription. One provider, they're charging $2,000 a year. And with that, you're getting all these templates to make whatever phony website you want to make to fool your local grocer or to fool the U.S. government. And the emails as well, emails with those domain names that look legit.

And you can custom make them any way you want. You're getting updates through the platform makers. They're even providing customer service. It's really that organized. Wow. A real one-stop shop. While this isn't a new trend, you report that artificial intelligence is really driving demand for this kind of technology.

I suppose, if we can call it. How big of a boom in demand are we talking now? Like anything else with artificial intelligence, it just sort of takes that model and puts it into hyperspace. So if you were putting out hundreds of emails or even thousands of emails to try to fool people, and of course, the more you put out there, the more

chance you have of tricking somebody or having someone fall for it. Now you're putting out tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of emails in just as much time. Also creating these kits, AI is helping make them look a lot more legitimate, making them look a lot more authentic.

So the numbers we had, phishing alone, the FBI had almost 200,000 reports of phishing attacks last year. But those are just complaints that individuals had sent to the FBI. So the number is likely to be a lot higher than that. There's a cybersecurity firm called Barracuda, which tracked a million phishing as a service attacks just between January and February alone. That's an enormous leap from previous months ago.

There's a phishing as a service platform on the dark web, encrypted messaging services and social media stuff. And there in April, their membership went from zero. They just put it up. So it went from zero to 1,700 in a matter of weeks. So demand is definitely out there. So.

So how do you know if you're on the receiving end of one of these things? Is it the same warning signs as other phishing attacks that we're used to seeing? Exactly. As we were saying, phishing itself is kind of a low-tech strategy, and preventing it is equally low-tech. It comes down to training, employee training and awareness to say, look, if something looks a little off...

If this doesn't quite look like your Microsoft 365 login page or your bank or there's something weird about this email that supposedly is coming from the IT department saying you have to log off and log back in again, that kind of stuff, that you should just treat it with suspicion and not click on it and not respond to it. That was Angus Loughton, a WSJ cybersecurity reporter.

And that's it for Tech News Briefing. Today's show was produced by Julie Chang with supervising producer Chris Inslee. I'm Victoria Craig for The Wall Street Journal. We'll be back this afternoon with TNB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening.

How can companies build AI they can trust? Here again is Hrithika Gunnar, General Manager for Data and AI at IBM. A lot of organizations have thousands of flowers of generative AI projects blooming. Understanding what is being used and how is the first step. Then it is about really understanding what kind of policy enforcement do you want to have on the right guardrails on privacy enforcement.

The third piece is continually modifying and updating so that you have robust guardrails for safety and security. So as organizations have not only a process, but the technology to be able to handle AI governance, we end up seeing a flywheel effect of

more AI that is actually built and infused into applications, which then yields a better, more engaging, innovative set of capabilities within these companies. Visit IBM.com to learn how to define your AI data strategy. Custom content from WSJ is a unit of the Wall Street Journal Advertising Department. The Wall Street Journal News Organization was not involved in the creation of this content.