Apple Puts an AI Assistant Inside Keynote, Pages and Numbers, and Opens the Apps to Outside Agents

CUPERTINO, Calif. - Apple’s office apps are getting a built-in AI helper, and a door for everyone else’s. The company said Tuesday that Keynote, Pages and Numbers will gain an intelligent assistant, in beta, for subscribers to Apple Creator Studio, its bundle of creative and productivity apps. The assistant is built on Apple’s own models and OpenAI’s, and Apple says it understands the context of the document that is open on screen. The update reaches the App Store in November as a free update for existing subscribers, according to Apple’s announcement.

Image: Apple

Each app gets its own job description. In Keynote, the assistant helps design, animate and refine slides. In Pages, it drafts, restructures and fine-tunes written content. In Numbers, it calculates, visualizes and organizes data, recommends chart types with a one-tap preview, and builds custom tables using what Apple calls “world knowledge.” The feature lands a day after iOS 27.2 gave Siri AI conversation memory and five more languages, and it pushes Apple’s AI work deeper into the apps people use for school and office work.

The bigger change may be the plumbing. Apple is adding support for Model Context Protocol, or MCP, the open standard Anthropic introduced for connecting AI models to apps and data. Apple says MCP lets external AI agents and tools “read content, perform edits, and execute automated actions directly in Keynote, Pages, and Numbers.” That means an agent a user already relies on could work inside a presentation or spreadsheet instead of handing back text to paste. MCP support requires macOS 27 or later, so for now it is a Mac feature.

Screenshot: @verge on X

Keynote is also getting a new file format to match. Keynote Interchange Format, or .keyx, is an open JSON-based bundle that Apple describes as designed to be readable and accessible to external tools, developer workflows and AI agents. For developers who have spent years reverse engineering Apple’s document formats, that is a notable shift.

The fine print matters. The assistant in Keynote, Pages and Numbers requires an Apple Intelligence-capable device running iOS 27, iPadOS 27 or macOS 27 or later, and it works in U.S. English only at first. The apps themselves stay free and come with every new iPhone, Mac and iPad. The assistant is part of Creator Studio, which costs $12.99 a month or $129 a year for new subscribers, with a one-month free trial and education pricing of $2.99 a month or $29.99 a year. Apple’s announcement does not spell out how users will approve an outside agent’s access to a document or confirm the edits it makes.

Image: Apple

The productivity apps are not the only ones getting an assistant. Logic Pro for Mac adds one in beta, powered by a combination of Apple-built and third-party models, that can help start a new song or set up a vocal track from a single prompt. It requires macOS 27 Golden Gate on an Apple Intelligence-capable Mac. Pixelmator Pro gains Generate Fill, which edits a selected part of an image from a text description, and Final Cut Pro for Mac now includes built-in MotionVFX effects, templates and transitions.

Screenshot: @9to5mac on X

“The assistant capabilities in Logic Pro, Keynote, Pages, and Numbers are going to change the game for how people interact with and learn to use these apps,” said Brent Chiu-Watson, Apple’s senior director of Worldwide Product Marketing for Apps and iCloud. The test will come in November, when subscribers can see whether an assistant that knows what is on the slide beats a chatbot in another window.