The early attempts at building dedicated AI hardware have not gone as planned. Products such as the Rabbit R1 and Humane AI Pin attracted attention when they launched in 2024, but neither managed to establish a lasting consumer market.
That has not ended the idea of AI-first hardware. Instead, it has raised a different question for the industry: whether consumers actually need another device when the smartphone already has the screen, applications, cameras, connectivity and computing power needed to run increasingly capable AI systems.
“Smartphones, along with their rich application ecosystems, have been the window to the world for over a decade,” said Navkender Singh, associate vice president for data and analytics covering devices and ecosystems at IDC India and South Asia.
He said moving users to an entirely new category of hardware was difficult because phones already do much more than provide access to AI. They are used for social media, entertainment, payments, communication and a wide range of other services.
The first wave of dedicated AI gadgets also arrived when consumer AI technology was still relatively immature, Singh said.
Mohammad Faisal Ali Kawoosa, chief analyst at Techarc, said the technology itself needs to develop further before standalone AI devices can become mainstream. In his view, future products will need to move beyond generative AI and become more “agentic”, allowing them to take actions, understand context and adapt to individual users.
That could eventually change the role of the smartphone without necessarily making it obsolete.
AI is already being built deeper into phones, with manufacturers using both cloud-based systems and increasingly capable chips to handle tasks such as image editing, translation, summarisation, search and voice assistance. The more AI can operate across applications, the less users may need to think about which app they should open to complete a task.
This is where the smartphone has an advantage over most of the new AI hardware. It already has access to a mature software ecosystem and a user’s existing data, accounts and services.
Dhananjay Yadav, founder of Indian AI hardware startup NeoSapien, said some of the early AI devices also struggled because consumers could not easily understand what they were supposed to do.
Products that attempt to perform many tasks without offering one clearly useful reason to own them can quickly appear gimmicky, he said.
The next generation of AI hardware is therefore likely to be judged less on how many AI functions it can demonstrate and more on whether it solves problems that existing devices do not handle well.
That distinction matters for companies considering whether to build entirely new products or put their resources into making phones more capable.
OpenAI and Apple have both been linked to work on new AI-focused hardware, adding to speculation that the industry could eventually move towards devices in which AI, rather than the traditional app interface, sits at the centre of the user experience.
But the smartphone industry is already moving in that direction without waiting for a new category of hardware to emerge.
The basic idea is a gradual shift from users telling a device what application to open towards users simply asking for an outcome. Instead of opening several apps to find information, edit content or complete a task, an AI system could increasingly handle those steps itself.
For that to work reliably, however, AI systems will need access to more context and greater ability to act on a user’s behalf. That also brings questions around privacy, security and control that manufacturers will have to address.
For now, the evidence from the first generation of dedicated AI devices suggests that consumers are not looking for another gadget simply because it has AI. The technology will have to offer something that existing devices cannot provide easily.
That leaves the smartphone in an unusual position. Rather than being displaced immediately by AI, it may become the platform through which much of the transition takes place.
