Premium smartphones are about to get a lot more ambitious than a chatbot tucked into a settings app. Counterpoint Research expects more than 80% of premium phones to ship with AI agent features by 2027, while wearables will take much longer to catch up, reaching a similar level of penetration only by 2032.
The shift is already showing up in silicon. MediaTek got there first with the Dimensity 9400, and Qualcomm followed with the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 and Snapdragon 8 Gen 5. That matters because these devices are being pitched as more than NPU-heavy phones: they are designed to run context-aware software that can plan, decide, and carry out multi-step tasks without constant hand-holding.
AI agents on premium phones arrive first
Counterpoint says one in three smartphones sold in 2027 will have AI features in the premium and upper mid-range brackets, with premium models above $600 leading the charge. That is the easy part for vendors: the buyers are already trained to swallow higher price tags, even if memory shortages are nudging those tags even higher.
The harder sell is convincing the broader market that this is not just another label slapped onto existing assistant software. The real requirement is stable, sustained AI performance and enough memory bandwidth to keep the agents useful, not merely technically present.
Wearables are following, but slowly
Wearables start from a lower base: AI-enabled devices are projected to rise from 30% in 2025 to almost 80% in 2032. The category includes smartwatches, health monitors, and other gadgets that increasingly process data locally after models are trained in the cloud, a setup that trims latency and helps with privacy.
The biggest volume will come from smartwatches and wireless earbuds, which are expected to gain live translation, speaker identification, and more personalized audio tuning. Smart rings are the fastest climbers in the bunch, thanks to their always-on tracking of heart-rate changes, sleep stages, and stress levels.
Counterpoint pegs the annual growth rate for AI wearables at 21% through 2032. That is brisk, but it also hints at where the money is: not in flashy demos, but in devices that can quietly do something useful every day without asking users to think too hard.
AI wearable adoption through 2032
- Premium smartphones: more than 80% with AI agents by 2027.
- Upper mid-range and premium phones combined: one in three sold in 2027.
- Wearables: almost 80% with AI by 2032, up from 30% in 2025.
The open question is whether consumers will keep paying more for these features once the novelty fades. If agents genuinely save time, premium phones should keep winning; if they feel like repackaged assistant tricks, the market will do what it always does and punish the hype cycle.