Apple just let an AI agent inside iMessage for the first time. The startup Poke can now talk with you through Apple Messages for Business, the same channel airlines, retailers, and hotels already use to chat with customers. For everyday users, it means an assistant that plans your day, edits your photos, and runs your smart home, all from a normal text bubble.
The Gist
- Apple approved Poke as the first AI agent on its Messages for Business platform.
- Poke handles planning, calendar, health, smart home, and photo editing, all by text message.
- The startup says it has relayed around 100 million messages and runs on SMS, Telegram, WhatsApp, and now iMessage.
Have ChatGPT Recap This Article
ChatGPTApple Just Opened Its Messages Platform to AI
For years, Apple Messages for Business has been a quiet but useful service. It is the standardized iMessage channel that big brands use to chat with customers about flights, deliveries, hotel bookings, and refunds. Until now, only human agents and basic automated chatbots were allowed inside it. For context, see our earlier piece on AI Noobies: Siri AI: Apple’s chatbot will finally hold a conversation.
On June 4, Apple changed that. The company approved Poke as the first AI agent officially allowed to talk with users through Messages for Business. Poke is built by The Interaction Company of California, a Palo Alto-based startup co-founded by Marvin von Hagen.
An AI agent, in plain words, is a chatbot that does not just answer questions but can actually carry out tasks for you. Booking, scheduling, editing, organizing. The difference matters because the previous bots inside Messages for Business were mostly scripted menus that pushed you to a human at the slightest complication.
Apple’s approval process was not quick. According to Poke’s team, it took a couple of months. Apple required verification of live human support fallback, clear identification of the AI agent inside the chat, and a customized interface matching Apple’s link preview and style rules.
In other words, Apple is letting AI agents in, but only when they look and behave like proper Apple citizens. The bar is high enough that Apple’s own broader AI push around Siri is no longer the only place where Apple users meet a smart assistant.
What Poke Can Actually Do for You
Poke is built around one simple idea. You text it like you would text a friend, and it does the thing. The promise is to never make you open a separate app for the boring stuff that already lives in your messages.
In its current scope, Poke covers daily planning, calendar management, health and fitness tracking, smart home control, and photo editing. All of it is driven by short text messages. You do not learn commands. You just describe what you want.
Concretely, that can look like asking Poke to move a meeting to tomorrow afternoon, to switch off the lights in the kitchen, or to crop and brighten the photo you just sent it. The same conversation thread can switch from one task to another without you re-explaining.
Poke is not new. The service already runs on SMS, Telegram, and WhatsApp in select markets. The company says it has relayed around 100 million messages across these channels. The iMessage approval is therefore an extension of a product that already has real usage behind it.
On pricing, the public details are limited. Apple charges Poke on a per-user basis, and the exact amount has not been disclosed. According to Marvin von Hagen, that per-user fee is significantly lower than what Meta AI is charged on its own platforms.
Why This Matters Even if You Do Not Use Poke
In the short term, the change is mostly invisible. Most iMessage users will not suddenly install Poke this week. But the fact that one AI agent has cleared Apple’s bar means more will follow, and they will follow within a chat app that is already on every iPhone.
This shift turns iMessage from a place where you talk to humans, with a few clunky bots in the background, into a place where AI assistants can become a normal contact in your chat list. The texting habit stays the same. The thing on the other side gets smarter.
It also tells you something about Marvin von Hagen’s quote on quality and trust. According to him, Poke is focused on building a brand that signals trust, which is exactly what Apple wants to hear before opening its messaging service to AI. Trust, not raw capability, is the gating criterion.
For beginners, the practical lesson is straightforward. If you already use iMessage every day, the next generation of assistants will probably reach you through messages first, not through a separate downloaded app. The reaction is going to look more like “I added a new contact” than “I downloaded another AI tool”.
In the medium term, expect more competitors to apply for the same access. The brands that already use Messages for Business will not stay quiet either. Many of them will likely want their own AI agent inside the channel they already pay for, which is when Poke’s first-mover status will really start to matter.
Follow the story on AI Noobies.
About the Author
