23/02/2026
The love affair with your SmartPhone has ended in flames and is over.
Let me start with some bad news. The device you're connected to 24/7, the one that wakes you up, navigates your day, stores your memories, helps you pay for groceries and travel on the metro while connecting you to the internet and social media, is already on the path to oblivion.
For nearly 20 years, the ubiquitous "smartphone" defined our digital lives and gave us bragging rights. It felt revolutionary because it put the internet in our pocket. But that model of screens, apps, tapping and scrolling looks increasingly clunky in an AI-native world.
As The Economist recently reported, the next computing shift isn't about a better handset or camera lens but about AI moving from being an app you open to an ambient layer that anticipates, decides and acts on your behalf.
Your current smartphone is reactive. It waits for you to touch it. It requires you to search, open, type and approve. In contrast, AI systems are designed to anticipate. They will draft before you ask, negotiate before you notice and filter before you see. The interface moves from “what button shall I press?” to “this is what I want, and you handle it.”
This tipping point has already arrived and your smartphone has become little more than a dumb terminal in your pocket. For those of us concerned with data protection and privacy, this is not some gadget story on BBC's Click. It's far more profound.
In our former screen-based world, we could point to a moment of interaction through a click, a tick or a swipe. Now, in this AI-mediated world, decisions are made continuously, invisibly and inferentially. The question for brand owners is no longer “what personal data did the user provide?” but “what did the system infer?”
An AI-native device doesn't simply process the data you input. It's working in the background, synthesising voice patterns, behavioural rhythms, location trails, transaction histories, biometric signals and contextual cues to predict what you're likely to want to do next. And that could even include going to the toilet!
Profiling ceases to be an add-on feature and becomes the operating system in this inferential world. So what happens to data minimisation? Forget it. The commercial incentive is to ingest more context about your life because better inference requires deeper knowledge than purchasing preferences alone.
We should also be honest about the human dimension. If your AI assistant books your travel, negotiates insurance, drafts correspondence and curates what you see and when, agency begins to blur. Convenience may increase, but visibility into how decisions are made for us simply evaporates.
The real disruption isn't hardware or wearable tech, like special glasses but the migration from interaction to inference. And inference is far harder to regulate.
