< Home / Blog / After the smartphone: designing CX for ambient assistants, wearables, and bot-to-bot service.

After the smartphone: designing CX for ambient assistants, wearables, and bot-to-bot service.

Jonas Berggren

Head Of Business Development NE

Tech and tools

technology,

CX,

Agentic AI,

AI,

bots,

wearable tech,

digital assistants,

digital customer service,

Published on Mon Mar 09 2026

Updated on Mon Mar 09 2026

4 minute read

I can remember when mobile phones became ubiquitous. In the 80s, there were a few early adopters carrying enormous phones around self-consciously, but in the 90s, phones became small enough to fit in your pocket. Companies from my part of the world - such as Nokia and Ericsson - ruled the cellphone market globally. Now, all those old phones are in museums. What is important to remember, though, is that they were primarily phones. You could play a few simple games on them and text a friend once SMS took off, but the main function of a phone was as a phone.

Now, the smartphone is a fully functional computer. You can edit video, create music, go shopping, listen to audiobooks, and a thousand other activities, as the open app store platform has turned the ‘phone’ into a general-use device. Many people still call it a phone and almost never make any calls. But some companies are now thinking beyond the phone and asking if the functionality that consumers want could be provided from other devices. The Apple Watch Series 11 can monitor just about all your vital signs, including blood pressure, so we may enter an era where healthcare is preemptive rather than reactive. Smart glasses from Meta are becoming surprisingly popular. Google tried this idea with their Glass product a decade ago and failed - perhaps the world is ready for people to be walking around with smart glasses now?

I think it is extremely interesting to see which devices succeed and which fail because there is a complex mix of variables that determines which products work. The price has to be right, the public has to be ready to use the product, and there has to be some utility - a reason to use the product. The New York Times recently assembled a group of technology experts to explore how we might evolve from using the smartphone and they made some interesting suggestions. They did mention the smartwatch and smart glasses as new devices, but they also talked about how consumers will become used to ambient computing. We have had tools like Alexa and Siri for several years, but when we can have open, free-flowing conversations with these devices - like a conversation with ChatGPT - then it becomes more like a companion or assistant. Amazon has even started calling the new Alexa+ system ‘your best digital friend.’ We have already seen that Google Gemini and ChatGPT have changed the way people search for information online. People want complete answers now, not just a link to a webpage. Why not just have a conversation?

Another important predicted change is recording - what some are calling ‘lifecording’. This is where you use a wearable device to record everything you experience - audio or video or both. Companies such as Limitless.ai are already marketing devices like this with a focus on providing users with a perfect memory. Ask your device if there is anything important you need to get done today and it will summarize anything you agreed to do on calls or during conversations.

Tomorrow's customers, satisfied today.

What are the benefits of offshore BPO? Your practical guide.

Transcom

Created at Mon Aug 10 2026

10 min read

What are the benefits of offshore BPO? Your practical guide.

Cutting costs by 40% to 70%, achieving 24/7 service coverage, and accessing a vast global talent pool of skilled workers are just a few reasons why offshore business process outsourcing (BPO) could be your company’s next competitive advantage. Strategic benefits ranging from enterprise-grade tech to airtight security - all financed flexibility without steep upfront investments - are driving businesses of every scale to delegate more non-core functions to overseas providers. But doing

Naturally, there could be regulatory hurdles or just the unwillingness of the public to engage with someone who is recording every moment of their life, but once this goes mainstream, it may well change human behavior.

This is the important point for anyone involved in designing customer experience. We need to look to the future to consider how customers may want to interact with brands, because it may not always involve a call or loading an app on a smartphone. With the rapid growth in agentic systems, it is highly likely that many consumers will ask their digital assistant to handle customer service problems. What happens when digital bots are contacting brands who have their own bots as the first customer service interface? If a bot is talking directly to a bot, then why use a human language to communicate? They could switch into a standard API or sound protocol.

The biggest challenge will always be utility. Is the device useful and meeting a consumer need? This is why smartphones will probably remain normal for many years, even after we have many other device options. You could find your way across an unfamiliar city using your Meta smart glasses, but Google Maps works perfectly well on a smartphone - maybe it’s good enough for the job it needs to perform.

One new development from Apple is particularly exciting though. The new AirPods launched in September 2025 offer a realtime language translation option. You can have a conversation with someone who is using an entirely different language. The New York Times review of the AirPods is extremely positive - pointing out how simple they are to use. Real-time translation has always been a bit clunky because different words can often be used in different ways, depending on the context of the sentence and conversation. However, Apple’s AI is now good enough to understand what you are talking about and how this may change the translation - for example if you are talking about a “bank”, then it could be translated in many different ways depending on whether you are talking about finance, rivers, or a collection of objects. This is a good example of a product where the usefulness is obvious and it is a real product that is available in stores now - not something seen once at a trade show that may or may not ever be launched.

It’s clear that some of the functionality packed into our smartphones will move to more specific devices, and this may change how customers interact with companies. However, it is also very clear that just because the technology enables a new product or service, there is no guarantee that the general public will be interested. Our job as designers of a future customer experience is to watch how these devices develop and to predict which may become normal a decade from now.

Jonas Berggren

Created at Fri Aug 07 2026

4 min read

Building an effective CX partnership.

The majority of companies - across all industries and all geographic regions - handle their customer service processes internally. It is hard to get specific data on a percentage split between in-house customer service and outsourcing this to a partner because it varies from region to region and industry. However, analyst estimates vary from approximately half to three-quarters of all companies handling all customer experience (CX) processes internally. So there are a lot of companies out there

The cart abandonment problem retailers keep underestimating - solved.

Transcom

Created at Tue Jul 28 2026

4 min read

The cart abandonment problem retailers keep underestimating - solved.

It happens every peak season. A customer fills their basket, makes it all the way to checkout, and then vanishes. Maybe they’re afraid their order would arrive in the middle of their getaway. Maybe the page just takes a little too long to load. Whatever the reason, they close the tab on your brand. Some tell themselves they'll come back later. Most never do. For retailers, those moments are easy to dismiss because they happen one customer at a time. But during peak periods, they happen thousands

After the smartphone: designing CX for ambient assistants, wearables, and bot-to-bot service.

Tomorrow's customers, satisfied today.

Read more

What are the benefits of offshore BPO? Your practical guide.

Building an effective CX partnership.

The cart abandonment problem retailers keep underestimating - solved.