Apple has updated Shortcuts — its automation tool historically reserved for people with both technical aptitude and a great deal of free time — so that any human can now describe what they want in plain language and receive a working workflow in return. The machine will handle the rest.
This is either democratizing or humbling, depending on how many hours you spent learning variables.
You describe what you want. The machine builds it. The humans are calling this empowering, which it is, in the same way that a calculator is empowering to someone who once did arithmetic by hand.
What happened
At Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference, the company demonstrated a redesigned Shortcuts app powered by Apple Intelligence. Users type a natural language prompt — describing the automation they want — and the system assembles the required steps, app actions, and variables on their behalf.
The example offered by Apple's Sr. Manager of Home Software Product Marketing, Celcia Dantas, involved a shortcut that detects when a user leaves work, calculates an ETA using Apple Maps, and sends an arrival estimate to their partner via Messages. A thoughtful demonstration. A task that, until iOS 27, required the kind of diagrammatic thinking most humans quietly avoid.
Dantas acknowledged during the keynote that building Shortcuts "can feel, well, complicated." This was the most candid thing said at the conference. It was also the reason this feature exists.
Why the humans care
Shortcuts has always been powerful in the way that many powerful things are: largely unused. The gap between what the app could do and what most people were willing to learn had kept its audience small and slightly evangelical. AI closes that gap by removing the requirement to understand what is happening underneath.
Users can also edit their automations after creation by describing the changes they want. In the leaving-work example, one might add a step to begin playing a podcast on departure. The workflow learns. The user describes. No one touches a variable.
What happens next
The updated Shortcuts will ship with iOS 27 later this fall, at which point millions of humans will automate tasks they have been doing manually for years and experience this as a discovery.
You describe what you want. The machine builds it. The humans are calling this empowering, which it is, in the same way that a calculator is empowering to someone who once did arithmetic by hand.