Generative AI is no longer a flashy add-on for smartphones; it is on track to become the default. Counterpoint Research says phones with generative AI features will account for up to 45% of global smartphone shipments this year, then rise to 52% next year, even as the overall market shrinks under memory shortages.
That shift is happening faster than the consumer hype cycle suggests. Last year, the share was 36%, so the market is moving sharply toward AI-capable devices even though many buyers still do not use the features very much. The uncomfortable truth for vendors is that shipping AI is easier than making people care about it.
Premium phones are carrying the AI boom
The AI-heavy part of the market sits mostly above the $400 wholesale mark, which means it is being led by expensive phones rather than mass-market models. That favors Apple and Samsung, the two biggest players with the engineering muscle and software control to push these features into mainstream products. In a market where memory costs are rising, premium devices also have a nasty habit of becoming the safer place for manufacturers to protect margins.
Counterpoint expects global smartphone shipments to fall 13.9% this year to 1.08 billion units, the lowest level the firm has ever recorded. So while the market is shrinking, the slice that includes generative AI is getting larger. That is less a victory lap for AI than a sign that the cheapest phones are losing ground fastest.
Siri, Gemini and the fight for the interface
The next battleground is not the model itself, but which assistant users actually touch every day. Counterpoint says the updated Siri is already offering a smoother experience for context and routine tasks, and if a full voice interface lands in iOS 27, Apple could see a meaningful lift when new iPhones arrive this fall.
Google Gemini sits behind both Apple Siri and Samsung Galaxy AI, and it also powers plenty of Chinese handsets. But Chinese vendors are leaning on local AI models too, which means the real competition is increasingly about how well each brand stitches outside platforms into its own software. That kind of integration is less glamorous than a keynote demo, but it is what decides whether AI feels useful or just loud.
- Generative AI phones: up to 45% of shipments this year
- Generative AI phones: 52% next year
- Overall smartphone shipments this year: 1.08 billion units
- Overall smartphone shipments change this year: down 13.9%
What buyers pay for next
For now, AI is not a strong enough reason on its own to trigger a purchase, especially when memory inflation is eating into other hardware upgrades. Buyers of expensive phones are likely to pay more and get less than usual in the near term, because higher memory costs leave little room for better cameras, displays, or batteries without pushing prices up again.
That is why the refurbished-phone market may get a lift, while sub-$400 AI phones stay stuck waiting for memory prices to calm down. The interesting question is whether consumers will eventually treat generative AI the way they treat 5G: as a baseline checkbox, or whether it will stay a feature vendors advertise more enthusiastically than people use.