Apple upgrades Shortcuts with natural-language AI workflow creation

Apple turned Shortcuts into something closer to a plain-language assistant than a power-user scripting tool. At WWDC 2026, Apple said users can now describe the automation they want in a prompt, and Apple Intelligence will build the shortcut and its actions behind the scenes.

That shift matters because Shortcuts has long been one of Apple’s most capable tools and one of its least approachable. The new interface lowers the barrier for nontechnical users who never learned how to chain actions together, while still preserving the depth that advanced users expect. Apple had already laid the groundwork in 2025 by adding intelligent actions to Shortcuts, and the 2026 update pushes the product from AI-assisted components toward AI-generated workflows.

Apple’s support materials describe those intelligent actions as building blocks that can summarize text, create images, or tap directly into Apple Intelligence or extension models. On Mac, the system can also pull in ChatGPT responses and feed them into a shortcut, which broadens what a workflow can do without forcing the user to stitch every step together manually. In practical terms, that means a shortcut no longer has to start as a blank canvas of individual actions.

Apple’s developer documentation says the new Use Model action lets people combine app actions and entities with Apple Intelligence models running on device or through Private Cloud Compute. That detail shows the company is not just adding a conversational front end; it is also wiring language-based requests into the underlying automation engine. Apple has also said Apple Intelligence is integrated across iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, AirPods, and Apple Vision Pro, making Shortcuts part of a broader push to make core apps feel more personal and more useful.

The same ambition also exposes the limits. Apple says Apple Intelligence features vary by platform, language, and region, so availability will not be uniform at launch. And because the system depends on a model correctly translating a user’s intent into a working sequence of steps, vague prompts could still produce incomplete or unreliable shortcuts. The promise is clear: automation that looks ordinary enough for everyday users to try. The test will be whether Apple Intelligence can make that simplicity dependable.