How Wireless Innovation and Agentic AI Will Converge to Enable Next-Generation Smart Living Experiences

A number of connectivity trends are converging that are underpinning the next wave of short-range wireless technology innovation. Growing demand for wireless technology, the emergence of new device categories, and the scaling up of existing use cases will lead Wi-Fi, Bluetooth®, 802.15.4, and Ultra-Wideband (UWB) device shipments to reach 5 billion, 7.7 billion, 2 billion, and 1.2 billion device shipments, respectively, by 2029. These will be enabled by technologies taking advantage of new spectrum (e.g., 6 Gigahertz (GHz) Wi-Fi), deployment in new frequency bands (e.g., Bluetooth® in 6 GHz and sub-1 GHz Wi-Fi HaLow), the migration to new standards (e.g., Wi-Fi 7, Wi-Fi 8, and 802.15.4ab UWB), and the emergence of new technologies such as NearLink, DECT NR+, and Z-Wave Long Range, among others. Furthermore, these technologies are becoming increasingly multi-functional, incorporating advanced positioning, secure ranging, and integrated sensing and radar capabilities, alongside the core communication capabilities, more commonly known as Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC). In addition, there is a desire for devices to support months to years of battery life, alongside taking advantage of energy harvesting, wireless power, and new power sources. Meanwhile, combining this with Artificial Intelligence (AI) can enhance performance, increase positioning and sensing accuracy, and optimize range and power depending on the requirements of the application, ensuring greater reliability, robustness, throughput, and reduced latency. These innovations are combining to enable transformational services across a wide range of Internet of Things (IoT) environments, in which the smart home is arguably at the forefront.

While AI is garnering a lot of attention for enterprise applications, as ABI Research’s recent insight demonstrated, there is an evolving concept of an “AI Home” vision that seeks to unify residential Wi-Fi infrastructure, home automation, home entertainment, consumer robotics, smart appliances, and home healthcare, into a converged platform bridged by AI. This will help enable the rise of truly intelligent living spaces that can support greater personalization and comfort, and improve health and elderly care, combining previously disparate applications into a seamless, intuitive end-user experience. This will have a number of significant implications for both the requirements on home networks and the changing role for service providers.

Of course, there are already a growing number of challenges being faced by Wi-Fi service providers. With the arrival of remote working and more demanding wireless applications, people are relying more and more on Wi-Fi technology, with ever-increasing demands being placed on the Wi-Fi network. Any performance degradation can lead to more costly service calls, retention challenges, and a diminished reputation. Meanwhile, home networks also need to provide support for more and more devices, operating on multiple technologies, each with their own diverse set of requirements. This ranges from battery-powered sensors to low-latency gaming applications, an increased desire for whole home and outdoor coverage, robots that may roam throughout the building, and the growing proliferation of voice assistants and displays in appliances. Meanwhile, the continued rollout of fiber shifts the bottleneck back to the home Wi-Fi infrastructure.

The implications for the future of home Wi-Fi networks are considerable. First, with the proliferation of Matter (over both Wi-Fi and Thread) for seamless smart home interoperability, the infrastructure will need to support multiple technologies such as 802.15.4 and Bluetooth® to more readily enable this vision. Second, as demands for performance, capacity, and reliability increase, this will accelerate the need for more available bandwidth (support for 6 GHz and 320 Megahertz (MHz)-capable Customer Premises Equipment (CPE)) and the migration to Wi-Fi 7 and Wi-Fi 8 technology. Meanwhile, with more and more devices being deployed in different parts of the home, devices that roam, providing outdoor and outbuilding home security and access control, will further drive the proliferation of mesh and extended range Wi-Fi, whether through adaptive performance or leveraging sub-1 GHz Wi-Fi HaLow. This diversity of applications brings the need for more Wi-Fi solutions that can adapt and react in real time to the changing traffic requirements, whether for low-latency gaming, remote conferencing, the position of a user, or optimizing the efficiency for multiple users at once. Finally, the emergence of Wi-Fi and ambient sensing technologies can enable greater contextualization, personalization, and the creation of valuable new home security and healthcare-related services.

It is in this context that various Wi-Fi chipset and CPE vendors are looking toward embedding AI Neural Processing Units (NPUs) in their product portfolios to help enable this more seamless vision of the future intelligent home. In November 2024, Qualcomm unveiled its Qualcomm Networking Pro A7 platform, now known as the Qualcomm Dragonwing™ NPro A7 Platform. This Wi-Fi 7 platform incorporates an AI coprocessor to enable key features, including a Smart Traffic Classifier, which when combined with Qualcomm® Service Defined Wi-Fi can optimize gaming, video, and streaming traffic to achieve up to a 50% average latency reduction in congested environments. Meanwhile, the platform also supports an AI-based range boost, alongside AI-based fault detection and logging to optimize overall performance. Along a similar vein, MediaTek’s Wi-Fi 7 Filogic portfolio also leverages AI to enable 30% or more improvements in throughput, range, and latency. AI-enabled Wi-Fi infrastructure is expected to grow significantly alongside the rollout of Wi-Fi 7 and Wi-Fi, bringing a combination of Wi-Fi optimization techniques alongside new service enablement.

In addition to traffic classification use cases, other promoted benefits include Agentic AI services such as finding devices in the home, home security, home healthcare, and elderly monitoring, among others, to better understand the context of what the user is doing, what they want to do, and adapting the network to the personalized requirements of the end user. Finally, this will also be combined with new Wi-Fi and ambient sensing capabilities that can help enable valuable new services, including gesture recognition, fall detection, breath detection, emotion detection, proximity detection, and occupancy sensing, among many others. All major developers of Wi-Fi CPE chipsets (Qualcomm, MediaTek, Broadcom, and MaxLinear) have committed to supporting Wi-Fi sensing, and many Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are already enabling Wi-Fi sensing on their already deployed CPE to increase the revenue they can derive from these assets. Meanwhile, late in January 2025, Samsung SmartThings introduced SmartThings Ambient Sensing, combining input from motion sensors, microphones deployed in devices, and appliances throughput the home to enable activity monitoring, optimize cleaning routines, and personalize the environment, as well as using Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI) to create a map of the home environment.

The ability to share information between previously siloed smart home devices, smart appliances, consumer robotics, home entertainment devices, combined with Wi-Fi sensing, and AI can enable valuable new services and personalized experiences to enhance customer retention and subscription revenue. As the Wi-Fi lifecycles become more and more protracted, this smart living concept can help incentivize upgrades to new technologies and equipment, create new services that can generate additional revenue, create stronger customer bonds, and enable more tailored customer recommendations and upgrade paths based on their specific usage, deployed devices, and home environment.

This concept of the AI Home will undoubtedly bring challenges, but there is a significant opportunity to redefine the role of Wi-Fi service providers in the home. We have now gone beyond the stage of attracting and retaining subscribers with faster speeds, and there is an increased emphasis on enabling higher reliability, new experiences, and valuable service creation. However, this requires service providers to develop a more unified holistic vision, identifying the right partnerships with smart home device and AI service providers, deploying the right connectivity technologies to address the variety of applications, and developing the right services and software to take full advantage and increase revenue and retention.

From a portfolio perspective, combining Wi-Fi 7, Wi-Fi 8, and Matter alongside AI-enabled infrastructure will be critical, as will deploying mesh solutions that can enable whole home coverage. Meanwhile, vendors should investigate Wi-Fi HaLow technology to provide more comprehensive outdoor and outbuilding coverage to enable new use cases within security, access, and sensor monitoring, while also freeing up some capacity in the legacy 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands, which are already congested.

Vendors must also develop a combined vision that blends Wi-Fi CPE alongside smart home and smart living services. This will include technologies such as Wi-Fi sensing, expanded management and optimization tools, and an effective security and privacy strategy. It will also require forming the right partnerships with smart home vendors and solution providers to enable consumers to pick and choose products that work seamlessly, reducing the complexity of smart home deployments, as well as partnerships with those that can enable wider service enablement, such as insurance providers.

Finally, from a marketing perspective, Wi-Fi CPE vendors and service providers should shift their focus toward their networking infrastructure becoming a robust, reliable, and scalable enabler of valuable smart home services, rather than just a faster pipe for traditional use cases. This will become increasingly important as new standards such as Wi-Fi 8 focus on reliability and do not bring significant improvements to throughput, a stark contrast with the traditional Wi-Fi upgrade cycles, most notably Wi-Fi 7.