From AI to AGI — how Honor’s Alpha Plan is making a big bet on the agentic future
AI is everywhere at MWC 2025, as it has been in the tech space as a whole for the past two years. But Honor’s new embrace of this technology with its Alpha Plan is another level of preparation for future developments and upcoming devices.
For one, Honor is now no longer a smartphone-focused company but an “AI device ecosystem company,” a change of direction driven by the company’s new CEO, James Li, who was clear about how he sees AI as a force on device development as dramatic as the introduction of the internet.
Smartphones are still going to be important for the company, Li explained, but the focus will now be on building an “intelligent phone” with help from Qualcomm and Google. this will utilize new hardware to offer AI features with multimodal, personalized and autonomous abilities.
This is then intended to lead to an intelligent ecosystem, with AI added to more devices, like AR/VR devices, automobiles and other vehicles, and robots. All of this will then apparently culminate in an intelligent world that will unite “carbon-based life with silicon-based intelligence.” Lofty goals indeed.
Honor’s AI today
To demonstrate what it’s capable of today with AI, Honor demoed its currently China-only mobile AI agent, made with Google and Qualcomm’s help.
In the pre-recorded demo, the user made a request for a local restaurant booking within half an hour’s travel. The AI could do this while also checking existing appointments in Honor Calendar, traffic conditions and the user’s typical eating habits to figure out which restaurant to pick and when to book.
This will apparently be offered on devices outside China in future, but no timeline has been announced.
The Alpha Plan also features AiMAGE (pronounced “aim-age”), a new name for Honor’s photography tech. This uses both on-device and cloud AI models to help sharpen images based on its training data, especially zoomed-in portrait or telephoto shots. The tech can be applied to existing photos with an AI Upscale tool as well, which will come to the Honor Magic7 series in March.
Honor also boasted about its all-ecosystem file sharing tool, letting you send files to Android and iOS devices equally as easily. A 1GB video can apparently be sent to many other phone brands, including iPhones, in just a matter of seconds. With a PC/Mac version on the way too, this could be another step towards bridging the divide between different brands of phone users. But we’ll have to see when it goes live.
AI Deepfake detection is something Honor’s shown off before, but that doesn’t make it any less useful. The ability for a device to flag suspicious video could prove invaluable for neutralizing scammers, so we look forward to trying it out away from the Honor demo area when it comes to flagship Honor phones “soon.”
Cooperation with industry partners is a big part of the Alpha Plan, but Honor wants that to increase as AI continues to develop. James Li openly called for other companies to collaborate, and promised that Honor will invest over $10 billion over five years to create an “open, co-created, value-sharing AI device ecosystem” with its partners.
What’s all this about trees?
A number of other companies joined Honor’s James Li on stage to light a tree, which is a peculiar bit of theatre even for a keynote presentation. The meaning is simple to grasp though: collaboration between the hardware partners at the roots of the tree, and the applications at the tips of the branches will result in the delicious fruit of an AI-powered ecosystem.
As well as its Alpha Plan, Honor announced it will now provide its flagship phones with seven years of Android updates like Samsung and Google. There were also some new devices, like the Honor Watch 5 Ultra, Honor MagicBook Pro 14, Honor Pad V9, and Honor Earbuds Open.
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