Beyond the Chatbot: Phone Makers Want to Make AI Your ‘Second Brain’

Have you noticed the signs of AI creep? When generative AI first arrived on phones, it took the form of standalone apps or individual features, tools like Google’s Circle to Search, for instance. But the rapid growth of AI and the need for a flashy new selling point for the annual churn of new devices means we’re seeing AI infiltrate our phones on a deeper and deeper level. Just take one look at Apple Intelligence or Google Gemini.

You may be wondering what this actually means for your next phone and the way you interact with it. For some time, big thinkers in tech have outlined a vision for our phones where AI is the central portal through which we interact with our devices. And central to that vision are AI agents, an advanced form of a chatbot that works across all of our apps. The apps themselves drift into the background, with AI — once a nice-to-have novelty — taking center stage.

I first saw how this idea could work last year at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, where German network Deutsche Telekom and Silicon Valley startup Brain.AI partnered on a concept device that could generate a unique phone interface in real time depending on how and why you used your phone. It pulled in essential information from the phone’s apps so you could use that data without the need to navigate into or between apps at all.

Last week at MWC 2025, I saw more evidence that tech companies want AI to be the primary way in which we interact with our phones. Deutsche Telekom was back, this time announcing a partnership with OpenAI rival Perplexity that will see the pair launch an AI Phone later this year. In a demo with an early prototype, I was interested to see that the phone features a dedicated AI icon where the home button once was that allows you to launch Perplexity directly from your lock screen, thrusting the AI agent into foreground.

One of the biggest proponents of the agentic AI interface is chipmaker Qualcomm, which is ensuring all of the top Android phone makers have the compute power needed to run demanding on-device AI. The company vision is that “AI becomes the new UI,” its marketing director Ignacio Contreras tells me. “It becomes the user interface through which we can interact with our devices.”

I’ve seen the evidence that this is possible, but one big roadblock remains in place: Do you, or I, or anyone else planning to replace a phone in the coming years actually want this?

Here Goes Nothing

If one tech company is going to win you over to the idea that AI belongs on your phone, it might just be British smartphone maker Nothing. Ironically, this is one of the few phone companies not actually using the words artificial intelligence anywhere in its marketing. At MWC this year, the company launched the Nothing 3A and 3A Pro. Both are fun, flashy and affordable, but it’s Nothing’s software upgrade that really got my attention.

Nothing has introduced a concept called Essential Space, where you can drop invites, screenshots, voicenotes or basically anything  interesting or important you want to track. Even better, it works with the touch of a dedicated physical button making the experience seamless. It fulfills the role of a centralized, personalized portal in the phone, where you can interact with AI and AI can interact with you in a useful way that goes beyond the standard chatbot paradigm by bringing together all your scattered thoughts and plans.

“The way we looked at Essential Space is almost as a second brain or a journal,” says Akis Evangelidis, one of the founders of Nothing. “We want to create one single hub where you could drop all those thoughts and inspirations, and hopefully it will help organize and make a sense out of it.”

Right now, the feature is in beta, and has limited functionality, but the idea is to gradually introduce more AI features and integrations over time, all of which have a clear use case. “We want to onboard gradually people onto that experience, versus kind of make it overwhelming,” Evangelidis says. “The first step is to educate people.”

Here, Nothing has shown itself to be clued into and prepared to tackle a key challenge in persuading the likes of me and you to get on board with interacting with our phones through AI. That means it will require us to change our behavior.

For this change in behavior to be a success, it has to be easier and more desirable to access our phones using AI than through the current interface, Contreras says. He compares it to the introduction of the clickable mouse or the touchscreen. More than that, however, it needs to be presented in an appealing and human way, he adds. “Design aesthetics and how to turn this into an experience, not just a technology, will be very important in terms of having (an AI interface) adopted,” he says.

Once again, Nothing, which has always had strong design principles at the core of its philosophy, is onto a winner here. With its tile-like interface, Essential Space is one of the most visually appealing attempts at integrating AI into a phone yet.

For now, it’s sitting on the sidelines, but I’m curious as to whether it could eventually become the de facto interface of the Nothing Phone, the first thing you see every time you unlock your device. “Eventually, yes,” Evangelidis says. Rather than requiring 50 different inputs, everything you need when you open your phone should be accessible in one specific space, he adds.

It’s a compelling argument in favor of foregrounding AI on phones, and a thoughtful approach to doing so. As the influence of AI over our devices continues to grow, let’s hope more phone makers have ideas like this in the pipeline.