The future where artificial intelligence has taken over most processes is something that Nothing CEO Carl Pei envisions, particularly for smartphones.

In fact, he believes that smartphone apps will eventually disappear and be replaced by AI agents.

Nothing's Carl Pei Claims AI Agents Will Replace Apps

Pei recently addressed the crowd at SXSW 2026, and according to 9to5Google, the executive touched on his prediction of what the future of smartphones would be like.

Here, the Nothing co-founder said that apps "are going to disappear" in the future, specifically smartphone applications that are best known to deliver most of the functions on devices.

The Nothing CEO said that this is inevitable "whether you like it or not."

The future that Pei predicts sees AI agents replacing apps to offer specific functions on the device.

AI Agents on Smartphones: Is It Coming to Nothing?

According to Pei, the present use of AI agents involves software that was developed for humans. This creates "friction" on usage and is not "the future" that he sees, where agents will be in charge of almost everything.

Instead, Pei said that developers need to "create an interface for the agent to use," which would create a "frictionless" experience for the machine learning technology to perform what it was made to do.

The CEO also talked about how Nothing will deliver AI-native devices in the future, as well as a device that only has one app "that will be its OS" and deliver all the phone's functions.