I felt it for the first time Mobile World Congress in February. I saw a phone software demo in which all applications have been replaced by an AI interface. Then last week at Qualcomm Snapdragon SummitCEO Cristiano Amon said he wanted to “break the paradigm of building apps.” The feeling of apprehension reappeared.

From everything I saw and heard, it seemed like we may have reached the beginning of the end for smartphone apps. Cause of death? Generative AI.

In his speech, Amon explained how AI will change the role of the operating system and the App Store. His thinking, shared by many at Qualcomm and in the tech sector in general, is that rather than going to our phone’s home screens to find and open individual apps, we will instead primarily interact with our phones through a ” agent” of AI.

This agent will have their fingers in everything from our calendars to our bank accounts to our messages to our health data. He will learn our tastes, our preferences and our habits. We might ask it to do anything, from helping us book flights to sending follow-up messages to our friends reminding them to reimburse us for dinner after splitting the bill for us.

An AI agent is actually an AI assistant – think Siri Or Alexa – come of age. The idea is that it will be at the center of our digital worlds, dancing across all our devices from smart glasses to cars, providing a consistent experience and adapting the way it interacts with us depending on the device we’re using.

“The AI ​​agent becomes this single entity, which is a starting point to do other things for you,” said Eric Dulkeith of IBM Research.

On the phone, it could eliminate the traditional home screen in total: the neat rows of icons replaced by a singular portal into which we pour our requests, our questions and our ideas. “AI is the new user interface,” Durga Malladi, Qualcomm’s senior vice president of technology planning, said on stage at the Snapdragon Summit.

“We all walk around with a mental image of a file structure in our head, right?” Malladi added later during a roundtable discussion with journalists. “You don’t have to do that anymore…it changes the way we interact with devices.”

Prognosis: a slow fade expected

The Snapdragon Summit was an opportunity for Qualcomm, which makes chips for almost every smartphone maker in the world except Apple and Google, to show off what could be possible with the company’s batch of smartphones. next year. Android Phones using his new Snapdragon 8 Elite chip. This includes AI agents, which will leverage the chip’s NPU (neural processing unit).

Already this year, we’ve started to see the beginnings of what will become AI agents — like Apple Intelligence and Galaxy AI – so it seems inevitable that this trend will increase in the coming year. But when Qualcomm talks about completely abandoning app-based phone interfaces, it sounds like longer-term thinking.

It won’t help that people aren’t replace their phone as often and that the type of NPU needed to run AI models with agent-level complexity will only be very recent. best phones over the coming year, said Leo Gebbie, principal analyst at CCS Insight. It may take a long time to reach a “tipping point,” where these phones end up in most people’s pockets.

So it seems that we are not witnessing an imminent fade to black, but a slow fade that will occur in the years to come. Instead of directly accessing our apps when we open our phone, they will start playing second fiddle to our AI agent, which we will use in their place. “They’re still there, but they’re in the background,” Malladi said.

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The way he described it, perhaps there is hope for the future of apps after all, at least in some form. Like the stars of yesteryear, they will survive but fade from our consciousness, playing a less significant role in our moment-to-moment digital interactions. Perhaps they will change shape, looking less like the applications we know today and effectively becoming plugins for the AI ​​agent.

Qualcomm is starting to help developers with this transition, said Ziad Asghar, senior vice president. App creators have access to Qualcomm’s AI Hub, announced this year at MWC, which will help them integrate generative AI capabilities into their apps. There’s a whole library of options to choose from and a playground to test them out on.

To keep our data secure and minimize the risk of our sensitive information being exploited, Qualcomm is emphasizing the importance of on-device AI – another thing made possible by its latest chipsets. (Apple is taking a similar approach to considering privacy in its AI technology.) Instead of living in the cloud, our AI agents will live close to home. “If we do it on the constellation of devices that you have on your body, the information doesn’t leave you,” Asghar said. “It’s staying within your circle of interest.”

“It’s quite complicated before it gets better”

With every terminal diagnosis, a second opinion is necessary. I asked Geoff Blaber, CEO of analytics firm CCS Insight, if he subscribes to Qualcomm’s vision.

“I agree that this is going to be a paradigm shift,” he said. We have long been stuck in a “narrow” mode of interacting with technology, he added. “You’re constantly going in and out, and your data is sort of contained in several different silos. »

There is, however, one big caveat. Blaber said that even if the technology is ready to go, some major players will need to be convinced for the move to agents to happen. Companies that currently have a stranglehold on our data might be reluctant to open the doors for an AI agent to enter.

Likewise, regulators are increasingly wary that large companies such as Apple and Google dominate our every move in the digital world. They demand that they open up their app stores and operating systems to give users more choice and control. The same will likely be true for AI agents.

“It probably gets pretty complicated before it gets better,” Blaber said, especially if you end up with more than one agent on your phone — which, let’s face it, only has limited space to run large AI models like this. There is still much to be done before the vision of an AI agent capable of orchestrating your entire digital life becomes a reality, he added.

In the meantime, Asghar said, applications will undergo a process of evolution. “I don’t think they’re going to disappear, but I think they’re going to change,” he said. As for our phone’s interface, he believes AI agents will coexist with the current app-based setup for a while until one wins out as the primary option.

I left the Snapdragon Summit feeling less morbid than the first day, but resigned to the fact that there will be casualties along the road as AI agents grow in power and prevalence. It is clear that change is in the air. Our app-based home screens seem to be on borrowed time. Apps will survive in some form, but not as we currently know them. Their twilight years are approaching on the horizon – let’s hope the sequel serves us just as well.