en.Wedoany.com Reported - The AI agent smartphone under ZTE Corporation, a Chinese communication equipment and smart terminal enterprise, will make its debut at the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference. The 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference will be held from July 17 to 20 in Shanghai, where the exhibition will showcase multiple new AI products, including the world's first AI agent smartphone as a new smart terminal offering.
The core of an AI agent smartphone is not merely embedding a large model into the device, but integrating the agent into the operating system and application invocation layer. Traditional AI smartphones primarily focus on functions such as voice assistants, photo enhancement, summary generation, and search Q&A, requiring users to manually switch between multiple apps. In contrast, the AI agent smartphone emphasizes intent understanding, task decomposition, cross-application invocation, and automated execution, enabling the phone to complete a series of operations based on a single natural language command from the user.
ZTE's subsidiary Nubia has previously collaborated with ByteDance's Doubao to launch the Nubia M153 Doubao Phone Assistant Technical Preview. This device integrates the Doubao phone assistant at the system level, which can be activated via voice or side buttons, and performs tasks such as ticket checking and booking, product ordering, batch file downloading, and logistics status inquiry across multiple applications. The AI agent smartphone debuting at WAIC will continue to showcase system-level agents, cross-application collaboration, and on-device interaction capabilities.
Such terminals impose high requirements on system permissions, application interfaces, model invocation, and security boundaries. For an AI agent to truly complete complex tasks, it needs to recognize on-screen content, understand user intent, invoke applications such as contacts, calendar, browser, maps, e-commerce, travel, and payment, and handle confirmation, navigation, input, price comparison, filtering, and result feedback during execution. Smartphone manufacturers must coordinate the operating system, AI model, on-device computing power, privacy permissions, and third-party application ecosystem within a unified architecture.
Hardware aspects will also be impacted by AI agent capabilities. AI terminals require stronger local inference capabilities, more efficient memory scheduling, more stable network connections, and lower-power continuous wake-up mechanisms. Cameras, microphones, screen content recognition, sensors, and cloud-device collaboration capabilities will all serve as input sources for the agent to assess the environment, understand tasks, and execute operations. For smartphones, the AI agent is not a standalone app but a foundational capability covering the interaction entry point, system services, and application execution chain.
The theme of the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference is "Intelligent Partners, Co-creating the Future." The exhibition area will exceed 100,000 square meters, with over 1,100 enterprises expected to participate, showcasing more than 3,000 products and technologies. Following the debut of the world's first AI agent smartphone, the focus of the smart terminal exhibition zone will shift from single AI function demonstrations to how system-level agents execute real tasks on smartphones, including specific capabilities such as voice interaction, cross-application operations, multimodal understanding, privacy authorization, and cloud-device collaboration.
