Skipping additional setup screens for Apple Intelligence with Jamf Pro on macOS 15.3 and iOS 18.3

Happy macOS 15.3 and iOS 18.3 day!

With today's releases, Apple has introduced automatically enabling Apple Intelligence on upgrade or update. Per their release notes:

• iOS 18.3 (source)
• For users new or upgrading to iOS 18.3, Apple Intelligence will be enabled automatically during iPhone onboarding. Users will have access to Apple Intelligence features after setting up their devices. To disable Apple Intelligence, users will need to navigate to the Apple Intelligence & Siri Settings pane and turn off the Apple Intelligence toggle. This will disable Apple Intelligence features on their device. (141646604)
• macOS 15.3 (source)
• For users new or upgrading to macOS 18.3, Apple Intelligence will be enabled automatically during Mac onboarding. Users will have access to Apple Intelligence features after setting up their devices. To disable Apple Intelligence, users will need to navigate to the Apple Intelligence & Siri Settings pane and turn off the Apple Intelligence toggle. This will disable Apple Intelligence features on their device. (141646607)

For organizations aiming to limit Apple Intelligence use where possible, they may find this automatic prompt to enable the functionality in Siri (independent of an Apple Account, waitlist, or ability to skip the prompt) less than desirable. Once thing to ensure you have in place for management if this is the case at your organization is to skip the Apple Intelligence setup pane in the automated enrollment settings (in Jamf Pro, the "PreStage Enrollment" configuration) for institutionally-owned computers and devices.

🔗 Creating a PreStage Enrollment to Deploy the Automated Device Enrollment Experience to Computers
🔗 Creating a PreStage Enrollment to Deploy the Automated Device Enrollment Experience to Mobile Devices
🔗 Automated Device Enrollment and MDM | Apple Platform Deployment

There are, however, additional setup screens for new features introduced after updates that come up ahead of loading the desktop. These helper screens can be skipped with the SkipSetupItems array for SetupAssistant. This new property for SetupAssistant was introduced in macOS 15 and iOS 18 to combine all SkipItems properties (now deprecated per Apple's documentation) into a single property with a defined array.

🔗 SetupAssistant | Apple Developer Documentation
🔗 SkipSetupItems | apple/device-management

In Jamf Pro, the SkipSetupItems key is available for iOS deployments as of Jamf Pro 11.9. To skip Apple Intelligence setup create a new mobile device configuration and toggle "Skip Intelligence" under "Skip Setup Items". The scope should be iOS 18 or newer (so something like OS Version greater than or equal to 18.0).

The SkipSetupItems keys do not have a UI element for configuration profiles for macOS 15 as of the time of writing this article (Jamf Pro 11.13.0), so for macOS the profile can be created using the "Application & Custom Settings" payload configured for the com.apple.SetupAssistant.managed domain.

In the preference domain file enter the following payload contents:

The scope here should be along the lines of the scope mentioned above, Operating System Version greater than or equal to 15.0.

This is all pretty new and has gone through limited testing on my part, so please, if you are investigating setting this value on your fleet of supervised computers and/or devices please test thoroughly ahead of a global deployment. Review the links to Jamf and Apple documentation linked above to make sure leveraging these settings makes sense for the defined policy set by your organization for managed Apple computers and devices.

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