As per recent tweets of Mark Gurman, a mandatory meeting has been planned by Apple for all employees of Apple Store soon after the iPhone 16 event that is scheduled to happen on 10th of September. The meetings are going to take place on September 12th evening or the morning on 13th of September, based on store.
Gurman mentions that the schedule of these meetings is unusual, as Apple generally organizes these meetings on Sunday instead of the week days. But it appears like Apple would be using another approach for iPhone release of this year.
Gurman also stated in a follow up tweet, that Apple has started guiding the retail employees about Apple Intelligence and he expects it to be a key element of iPhone 16 sales pitch at Apple stores.
It is expected that Apple Intelligence won’t be available alongside the iPhone 16 release in September, as it was officially postponed to iOS 18.1 in October. Features including the New Siri Interface, Notification Summaries, and the Writing Tools would be accessible then, while enhanced features such as ChatGPT Integration, Image Playground, and Genmoji would remain unavailable till iOS 18.2 release or afterward.
Various analysts have anticipated that AI would boost the sales pitch of iPhone 16 to the extent of 10 million units, therefore this is not essentially unexpected that Apple is planning to present the features to users in the store.