It should come as no surprise that Omni Group is ready for macOS Tahoe 26, iOS 26, iPadOS 26, and visionOS 26 on day one, with a full Liquid Glass revamp across its entire suite of apps.
But beyond the visual overhaul, one of the most interesting additions is the support for Apple’s Foundation Models framework in OmniFocus 4.8. Here’s what it can do.
Quick recap on Apple’s Foundation Models framework
With today’s updates, Apple is introducing the Foundation Models framework, which lets developers plug into its local model to offer their own AI features. This means that developers have access to the same local AI power as Apple, with the added bonus of not having to rely on costly API dependencies.
What’s more, access to a local model means no need for a web connection, which makes this more private, faster, and more useful for developers and users.
What this means for OmniFocus 4.8
For OmniFocus 4.8, this means that you can now tap into Apple’s local model for a more robust Omni Automation feature set, starting with 7 plug-ins, for both heavy and casual users alike:
Prompt Tester
Prompt for Array Response
Solar Power Project
Intelligent Assist
Help Me Estimate
Help Me Plan
Clipboard Events
As one example, say you’re thinking about adding solar panels to your home, but don’t really know where to get started. You can just prompt OmniFocus right from the new project entry, and it will quickly generate the entire project, complete with actions, sub-actions, descriptions, and different priorities for each step.
If you’d like a new exercise routine, you can use the “Help Me Plan” plugin and prompt it with details such as your goals, the frequency, intensity, and types of movement you’d like to work on. The plugin will generate a full exercise set and, if you don’t like the result, you can tweak your instructions and prompt it again until you’re happy with the result.
For more advanced users, Omni Automation with Apple’s Foundation Models fully supports scripting and more complex schemas, all of which you can inspect via the logs and responses from the Automation Console window.
Having the ability to send natural language prompts and receive the output either as text or as a JSON strucuted format is a particularly powerful toolset, as it essentially turns Omni Focus into an actionable symbolic programming language tool, bringing together the raw power of automation and the semantic layer of AI-based world knowledge.
Here’s Omni Group CEO Ken Case on the introduction of Apple Intelligence on Omni Automation:
“So, beginning with OmniFocus 4.8 on macOS Tahoe 26, iOS 26, iPadOS 26, and visionOS 26, Omni Automation introduces support for querying Apple’s on-device Foundation Model directly from within scripts and plug-ins. This means you can take advantage of AI without sharing your personal information or data with third-party AI services: all interaction is performed on your Apple device (computer, iPad, iPhone, or Apple Vision Pro). (…) Plug-in authors can integrate the language models with your OmniFocus data in all sorts of creative ways. For example, we’ve created a “Help Me Plan” sample plug-in, demonstrated in the video above, that breaks down the selected task into smaller tasks. Whether or not to use these AI models is completely up to you. They’re not perfect oracles by any means. But sometimes even a bad suggestion can help you past a mental block in planning a project, so you can move forward again.”
You can read more about Omni’s integration with Apple’s Foundation Models framework here.
9to5Mac’s Take
This idea of getting “unstuck,” which is something Case highlights, is the main point of today’s update. For Automation as a whole may seem like an overwhelming idea when you first get started, but before you know it, you’ve accidentally become a programmer, and you won’t even remember what life was like before that.
If you’ve never looked into automation before, there has never been a better time for it. Omni’s take at integrating Apple’s foundation models is the most elegant, complete, and streamlined I’ve seen in a while. Their integration into Apple’s Foundation Models framework is as comprehensive and flexible as you’d expect from them, and I can’t recommend this update enough.
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