Apple's iOS 27 photo tools

PLUS: Microsoft Copilot hits 20M paid seats, and OpenAI's Codex expands to workplace docs

Author

Gen AI Art
May 02, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

In partnership with

How Jennifer Aniston’s LolaVie brand grew sales 40% with CTV ads

The DTC beauty category is crowded. To break through, Jennifer Aniston’s brand LolaVie, worked with Roku Ads Manager to easily set up, test, and optimize CTV ad creatives. The campaign helped drive a big lift in sales and customer growth, helping LolaVie break through in the crowded beauty category.

Apple is set to bring generative photo editing to every iPhone with iOS 27 — three new tools called Extend, Enhance, and Reframe that expand backgrounds, fix lighting, and reshape perspective natively in the Photos app.

For the hundreds of millions of iPhone users who have never touched Google’s Magic Editor or Samsung’s tools, this could be the moment AI photo editing stops being a feature you seek out and becomes one you just find in your pocket.

Today in AI:

  • Apple’s iOS 27 adds three generative AI photo editing tools

  • Big Tech’s Q1 earnings show AI investment paying off

  • OpenAI’s Codex expands into workplace documents

What’s new? Apple is reportedly adding three new Apple Intelligence photo tools to iOS 27 — Extend, Enhance, and Reframe — ahead of a WWDC announcement on June 8, putting generative AI photo editing natively inside the iPhone Photos app.

What matters?

  • Extend uses generative AI to expand a photo’s background beyond its original frame — comparable to Google’s Magic Editor, but native to the iOS Photos app for the first time.

  • Enhance automatically improves lighting and image quality, while Reframe adjusts perspective and composition after the shot — with particular utility for Apple’s spatial photography format.

  • The existing “Clean Up” object-removal tool will join the new features under an Apple Intelligence Tools umbrella, consolidating AI editing into a unified suite rather than scattering functions across menus.

Why it matters?

Google’s Magic Editor and Samsung’s comparable tools have been available for years, but Apple’s native integration brings generative photo editing to hundreds of millions of iPhone users by default — without downloading a separate app. If WWDC confirms the feature set on June 8, this will likely be the moment AI-assisted editing crosses from enthusiast tool into everyday habit.

GUIDE

What’s new? All four of the major AI spenders — Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft — delivered strong Q1 2026 earnings this week, with Microsoft reporting AI revenue of $37B (up 123% year-over-year) and Microsoft 365 Copilot reaching 20 million paid seats.

What matters?

  • Meta raised its full-year capital expenditure forecast to $145B — an extraordinary level of AI infrastructure spending that signals a massive expansion of its compute footprint.

  • Google Cloud grew 63% to $20B in Q1 with a $460B backlog, while AWS grew 28% — both pointing to enterprises actively committing to AI-powered cloud services.

  • Microsoft’s 20 million paid Copilot seats marks a significant adoption threshold — the clearest public signal yet that enterprise AI tools are moving from pilot programs to mainstream deployment.

Why it matters?

After years of “AI investment mode,” the returns are finally becoming quantifiable. When AI revenue is growing 123% year-over-year at Microsoft and Google Cloud is booking $460B in future orders, the question shifts from whether AI will pay off to how fast companies can build the infrastructure to meet demand.

SPONSORED BY WISPR FLOW

Give your coding agent the context it actually needs.

Coding agents are only as good as the context you give them. But typing out detailed prompts with file references, variable names, and reproduction steps takes forever — so you shortcut it. The agent guesses. You debug its guesses.

Wispr Flow lets you speak your prompts into Cursor, Warp, or any agent-powered IDE. Talk through the full context naturally and get clean, formatted input with auto-tagged file names and preserved syntax.

More context in, fewer iterations out. Used by engineering teams at OpenAI, Vercel, and Clay. 89% of messages sent with zero edits.

What’s new? OpenAI launched Codex for Work, enabling ChatGPT’s coding agent to work directly on documents, spreadsheets, and slides — integrating with popular workplace applications and positioning itself as a direct competitor to Anthropic’s Claude Cowork in the enterprise space.

What matters?

  • Codex for Work connects to workplace tools including Microsoft Office and Google Workspace formats, letting users delegate document drafting, spreadsheet analysis, and presentation work to an AI agent.

  • The expansion moves Codex beyond code — from a developer tool into a general productivity agent capable of executing multi-step work across a user’s document library.

  • OpenAI added hardware key authentication for ChatGPT accounts alongside the launch, reflecting the security requirements of enterprise customers moving sensitive documents into AI workflows.

Why it matters?

Claude Cowork and Microsoft Copilot have had a head start in enterprise document AI, but OpenAI’s distribution advantage — ChatGPT’s 500M+ weekly users — makes Codex for Work a significant competitive entry. For businesses already inside ChatGPT’s ecosystem, enabling document workflows without switching platforms could accelerate adoption quickly.

Everything else in AI

Gemini is rolling into Google-built vehicles, replacing Google Assistant in cars with conversational AI for navigation, temperature control, vehicle manuals, and EV charging info — starting with General Motors’ 4 million vehicles from 2022 and newer.

Contra Labs published the Human Creativity Benchmark, finding no single AI dominates every creative phase — Claude leads on ideation, Gemini on design systems, and ChatGPT on refinement across three creative stages.

Parallel Web Systems raised $100M at a $2B valuation, building AI-agent-optimized APIs for web search, extraction, and monitoring — nearly tripling its valuation in five months.

Lovable launched a mobile app enabling developers to build functional web applications from their phones — capturing ideas via voice or text and syncing builds across devices with push notifications.

Essential AI Guides - Reading List:

Let us know!

Work with us

Reach 100k+ engaged Tech Professionals, Engineers, Managers and decision makers. Join brands like MorningBrew, HubSpot, Prezi, Nike, Ahref, Roku, 1440, Superhuman, and others in showcasing your product to our audience. Get in touch now →