It seemed almost absurd the first time someone asked a smartphone to set a reminder by holding it up. A bit dramatic. Now that conversational AI has been around for a few years, asking a machine to do something for you feels expected rather than just normal. Silently and swiftly, the bar has shifted, and businesses that haven’t kept up are beginning to notice the difference.
In Cupertino, that tension is most apparent at the moment. For the better part of two years, rivals have outperformed Apple, the company that essentially created the category of the personal AI assistant with Siri back in 2011. Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic are all releasing models that can reason, speak, and adapt in ways that make Siri seem like a thing of the past. In 2024, Apple did reveal Apple Intelligence, its own AI suite. However, the main feature—a more intelligent and conversational Siri—was subtly postponed. Indefinitely, roughly speaking. Despite this, the company ran advertisements for it, which is an uncommon level of confidence—or perhaps more accurately, miscalculation.
Apple essentially told the market not to expect anything meaningful from it in 2025 and promised to “blow everyone away” in 2026, according to Gene Munster, an analyst at Deepwater Asset Management who has followed the company for decades. In a sector that is changing so quickly, that is a daring commitment. In 2025, Google’s stock increased by more than 60%. Apple’s was up twelve.
However, Apple is not the only company under pressure. Aware that the gadget in everyone’s pocket was created for a different technological era, the entire industry is in a state of productive panic. Cristiano Amon, CEO of Qualcomm, a company whose chips power about five billion devices globally, has been remarkably open about this. He predicts that within five years, there will be hundreds of millions of AI agent devices, such as glasses, pins, pendants, and items that people wear instead of holding. He believes that the smartphone is not long for its throne.
That makes sense logically. For AI agents to be useful, they must be able to see what you see, hear what you hear, and comprehend context in real time. Nearly none of that is provided by a phone in your pocket with a dark screen. Nearly all of it comes from glasses that are positioned on your face and pointed in the same direction as your eyes. Google and Meta are already deeply involved in the development of smart glasses. In order to create whatever comes next, OpenAI paid $6.5 billion to acquire the hardware startup headed by Jony Ive, the man behind the original iPhone. Anyone who is paying attention can see how ironic it is that the man who created the gadget that ruled a generation is now trying to replace it.
Who truly wins this transition is less certain. Amon has a gut feeling that the AI device era will be more fragmented than the smartphone era, with people selecting their own jewelry, glasses, and fashion sense. There’s no assurance that a single business will be able to maintain Apple’s long-standing dominance. He contends that the operating system will not be the new control point. The AI agent will be the one. Your loyalty is earned by the person you trust to manage your agent.
In these discussions, the word “trust” keeps coming up, and it should. Theoretically, everything you see and hear will be continuously streamed to the cloud by the AI devices being developed for the 6G era. It’s hard to even imagine how much personal information is involved. At the moment, Silicon Valley excels at promising game-changing products. In the past, it has been less dependable when it comes to appropriately managing sensitive data. To be honest, one of the most significant unanswered questions of the decade is whether that track record improves before this technology reaches scale.
With the retirement of longtime executive John Giannandrea and the public announcement of a new VP hire from Google Gemini, Apple has reorganized its AI leadership back in Cupertino. This is a rare move for Apple. It implies that the business is aware of the risks. When the new Siri is released, it must be more than incremental. There must be evidence that Apple still knows what consumers genuinely desire from a gadget that is meant to feel intimate.
Observing all of this gives me the impression that the smartphone era simply ceased to be the main narrative rather than coming to an end. A dozen businesses are currently writing the next chapter, moving quickly and developing in various ways, none of them fully certain which form factor will endure. That doubt is genuine. The momentum is the same.
