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

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.