a lot of Apps are adding artificial intelligence to your products in the coolest possible way. Companies like Google, Microsoft, and Meta are adding colorful buttons and pop-ups to their user interfaces, and bombarding their customers with marketing emails, all loudly urging users to try out new AI features.
In that context, it was refreshing to talk to indie app maker Omni Group about their approach to AI. The Seattle-based company makes OmniFocus, a powerful task management application that has long been loved by reviewers and enthusiasts for its extreme flexibility. If you can imagine a way to manage your tasks, OmniFocus is flexible enough to be enabled without ever feeling overly cluttered. And the AI plans are in line with that: The development team wants to keep the AI offline and private, and empower users to set it up however they want.
This means that the average OmniFocus user will not see any pop-ups requesting to use AI in the application. Instead AI is added as a potential tool for those who want to create automation, or who install one of the automations built by someone else. Some people have already done just that; You can find some such automations here. Here’s how to get them moving.
OmniFocus works on many Apple devices.Courtesy Omni Group
Installing AI in OmniFocus
To get started you’ll need to be running one of Apple’s new “26” operating systems – macOS, iOS, and iPadOS are all supported. All of these operating systems support one of the least-discussed new features in macOS 26 — third-party applications can now use Foundation, the larger language model that powers Apple Intelligence.
To use these new features you will also need an updated version of OmniFocus, which is currently the only Omni application that supports AI. (According to company representatives, these features are eventually coming to other Omni applications like OmniPlanner and OmniGraphal.)
.PNG "How to Use the New AI Features in OmniFocus, the Power User’s To-Do List 3")
screenshotCourtesy Omni Group
Next, go to the omni-automation directory and click on one of the productivity tools that looks interesting. You’ll see the source code for the automation, but you can always click the Install Plugin button above the code for a plug-in. (You may need to enable scripts from external applications before installing anything.)
One, called Help Me Plan, can break down any task in your inbox into subtasks. I tried it on a task called “Write about Omnifocus automation features” and several subtasks were immediately added underneath, from research to drafting to finalizing. Now, these are not the steps Absolutely How would I proceed in writing an article, but the idea is more to get yourself started when you feel stuck.