Apple adds AI assistants to Pages, Keynote and Numbers and opens the apps to MCP on macOS 27

Apple is putting a conversational assistant inside its three office apps. In an October 27 update to its Creator Studio subscription, the company announced beta AI assistants for Keynote, Pages and Numbers, and said that on macOS 27 the same apps will accept connections from outside AI agents through the Model Context Protocol (MCP).

What the assistants do

Each assistant works with the context of the open file, so users can make requests without leaving the document. According to Apple, the Keynote version helps design, animate and refine slides; the Pages version drafts, restructures and polishes text; and the Numbers version performs calculations, organizes data, proposes chart types with a quick preview and can build tables using general world knowledge. iGeeksBlog's overview of the feature adds that the assistants can generate images and shapes, write presenter notes and turn plain-language descriptions into formulas.

Apple says the feature is built on its own models and on OpenAI. It requires an Apple Intelligence-capable device running iOS 27, iPadOS 27 or macOS 27 or later, and is limited to U.S. English. The assistant is part of Creator Studio, priced at $12.99 per month or $129 per year in the U.S.; the core apps remain free for ordinary editing. Apple says the update reaches the App Store in November.

MCP support on the Mac

The more technical change concerns the Mac. On macOS 27, Keynote, Pages and Numbers support MCP, an open standard for connecting AI systems to tools and data. Apple says this lets external agents and tools read document content, make edits and trigger automated actions in the apps, building on the same platform as the assistants. In practice, that could allow a third-party agent to update a spreadsheet or assemble a presentation directly, although Apple has not published details on which clients are supported or how permissions are handled.

Open questions

The release offers little on privacy for the cloud-based assistants or on how data is shared with OpenAI. The assistants are still in beta and English-only, and their usefulness compared with similar tools in Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace remains to be seen. Alongside the AI features, Apple also introduced an open, JSON-based Keynote Interchange Format (.keyx) meant to make presentations easier to reuse in other software.