Your app is on borrowed time. Introducing AI agents

The first time I felt it was at Mobile World Congress in February. I saw a demo of the phone software where all the apps were replaced with an AI interface. And at Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit last week, CEO Cristiano Amon said, “We want to break the paradigm of app structure.” The feeling of foreboding rose again.

Judging from everything I saw and heard, it seemed like we were reaching the beginning of the end for smartphone apps. What was the cause of death? Generative AI.

In his keynote, Amon explained how AI will change the role of operating systems and app stores. His idea, shared by Qualcomm and many others in the technology industry, is that rather than going to your phone’s home screen to find and open individual apps, you can connect your phone primarily through an AI “agent.” It’s about having a dialogue.

This agent has its hands in every piece of the pie, from our calendars to our bank accounts to our messages to our health data. It learns our tastes, preferences, and habits. We’ll be able to ask the app for anything, from helping us book a flight to sending a follow-up message reminding a friend to pay for dinner after splitting the bill.

An AI agent is effectively an AI assistant (think Siri or Alexa). The idea is that it is the center of our digital world, dancing across all our devices, from smart glasses to cars, providing a consistent experience, and changing depending on the device we’re using. and adapt how it interacts with us.

“The AI ​​agent becomes that single entity, and that’s the starting point for doing everything on your behalf,” said Eric Dulkeith of IBM Research.

Phones may do away with the traditional home screen entirely. Instead of a neat row of icons, you’ll see a single portal for entering your requests, questions, and ideas. “AI is the new UI,” said Durga Maradi, Qualcomm’s senior vice president of technology planning, on stage at Snapdragon Summit.

“We all walk around with images of file structures in our heads, right?” Maradi later added during a roundtable discussion with journalists. “We don’t have to do that anymore…it’s changing the way we interact with our devices.”

Prognosis: slow decline expected

Snapdragon Summit gives Qualcomm, which makes chips for almost every global smartphone maker except Apple and Google, a glimpse into what next year’s batch of Android phones will be capable of using its new Snapdragon 8 Elite chips. It was an opportunity to demonstrate. This includes an AI agent that utilizes the chip’s NPU (neural processing unit).

Already this year we are starting to see the beginnings of what will become AI agents, such as Apple Intelligence and Galaxy AI, and it seems inevitable that this trend will increase next year. But when Qualcomm talks about a complete transition away from app-based phone interfaces, it feels like long-term thinking.

Principal analyst Leo Gebbie believes that people won’t be replacing their phones as often and that the type of NPU needed to run AI models of agent-level complexity will make the best phones next year. He said it doesn’t help that it is only installed in At CCS Insight. It could take a long time for these phones to reach the ‘tipping point’ where they are in most people’s pockets.

So we seem to think that rather than an imminent return to surplus, we will see a gradual return to surplus over the next few years. Instead of accessing an app directly when we open our smartphone, the app initiates a second operation of an AI agent that reaches out to us on our behalf. “They’re still there, but in the background,” Maradi said.

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As he explains it, there may be hope for the app’s future, at least in some form, after all. Like the stars of yesteryear, they will survive, but they will fade from our consciousness and play a less prominent role in our moment-to-moment digital interactions. Perhaps they will morph and no longer resemble the apps we know today, effectively becoming plug-ins for AI agents.

Qualcomm is starting to help developers with this change, said Ziad Asghar, senior vice president. App makers will have access to Qualcomm’s AI Hub, announced at this year’s MWC, to help them bring generative AI capabilities to their apps. There’s a whole library of options to choose from and a playground where you can test them out.

To keep data safe and minimize the possibility of sensitive information falling into the wrong hands, Qualcomm emphasizes the importance of on-device AI. This is also made possible by the latest chipsets. (Apple has taken a similar approach to building privacy into its AI technology.) Rather than living in the cloud, our AI agents will live close to home. “If we do it with a series of devices that we put on your body, the information never leaves you,” Asghar said. “It stays within your interests.”

“It gets pretty dirty before it gets better.”

All terminal diagnoses require a second opinion. I asked Jeff Blaver, CEO of analytics firm CCS Insight, if he supports Qualcomm’s vision.

“I agree that it’s worth changing the paradigm,” he said. He added that we have been stuck in one “narrow” mode of interacting with technology for a long time. “Data is stored across multiple different silos, always fragmented.”

However, there is one big caveat. Braver said the technology is ready, but some large companies will need convincing to make the transition to agents. The companies that currently control our data may be reluctant to open the gates for AI agents to extend their tentacles.

Similarly, regulators are increasingly wary of large companies like Apple and Google controlling our every move in the digital world. They are demanding that app stores and operating systems be made public to give people more choice and control. Perhaps the same is true for AI agents.

“It’s probably going to get pretty nasty before it gets better,” Blaber said. He said there is limited space to run such large-scale AI models, especially when it comes to using multiple agents on mobile phones. He added that much needs to be resolved before the vision of an AI agent that can orchestrate your entire digital life becomes a reality.

In the meantime, Asghar said the app will go through a process of evolution. “I don’t think they’ll go away, but I think they’ll change,” he said. When it comes to our mobile phone interfaces, he believes they will coexist with current app-based setups for some time until AI agents win out as the dominant option.

I left Snapdragon Summit feeling less morbid than I did the first day, but accepting the fact that there will be casualties on the road ahead as AI agents grow in power and pervasiveness. . It is clear that change is occurring. Our app-based home screens seem to be on borrowed time. The app will survive in some form, but not as we know it at the moment. Their later years are just around the corner. Let’s pray that what happens next will help us as well.