Summary
- Agentic AI enables proactive smart homes that can make decisions independently without constant user prompts.
- Smart home AI agents are set to revolutionize the home automation experience, offering convenience and efficiency.
- The future of smart homes lies in local AI agents, ensuring control remains within homeowners’ hands for reliability and accessibility.
While practically every smart home product has now pivoted to using “AI” somewhere in their marketing material, the actual impact of recent AI development hasn’t impacted the smart home experience much. However, with the rise of AI agents, that’s set to change in a big way.
What’s Agentic AI?
Typically, when you interact with current chatbots or other machine learning systems, they are waiting for a prompt from you to do something. Without that prompt, nothing happens. Agentic AI (explained excellently in Harvard Business Review) is all about agency. That is, creating AI agents that don’t have to wait to be told something, but can make their own decisions and proactively solve problems.
These agents can adapt to different situations and come up with appropriate solutions by going through some form of reasoning based on what’s currently happening. This usually requires several different types of machine learning technology in combination, so it’s more than just a Large Language Model, or a machine vision system, for example.
It Means a Proactive Smart Home
By bringing agentic AI into our homes, we could have a smart home that doesn’t need you to painstakingly tell it what to do. Just like, say, a human housekeeper or butler, it will learn what’s needed based on its observations and your interactions with it. Some companies are moving fast in this area, such as LG with the 2024 introduction of their Smart Home AI Agent concept.
This “zero-labor” home automation solution is meant to manage all the stuff in your home. In this case, the agent is embodied in a roving robotic platform, but of course there are no particular reasons this has to be the case. It can just be a computer program somewhere that can control the technology in your home as needed, using various mics, cameras, and other sensors as its eyes and ears.
This Is the Smart Home We Were Promised
Agentic AI promises to bring us the sci-fi smart home dream. You don’t have to think about managing your home, the agent (or agents) keep an eye on everything, automatically react when things happen, or act on their own predictions based on past data. They aren’t waiting to be prompted, they are constantly checking if something needs doing.
This can be as simple as ordering milk when you crack open the last bottle, or as complex as calling the local dry-cleaners and getting quotes for that red wine you just spilled on your white shirt. Then ask you if you want to arrange a pickup. This technology can be extended in all sorts of directions, such as helping in medical emergencies, or getting help if it detects a break-in.
It remains to be seen how much autonomy and flexibility different companies will build into their products, but as agentic AI becomes more reliable, I suspect it will eventually be quite comprehensive.
Of course, reliability is the elephant in the room. Just like people, AI agents can make mistakes and cause potential harm. So guardrails that strike a good balance between safety and utility will be the largest hurdle other than getting the base technology to work at all.
It Would Be Even Better Local
I’ve said in the past that a real smart home should be offline. Ceding control of the technology in my home to a computer somewhere far away in a data center doesn’t seem like a good idea. Services get shut down, the internet goes out. Things happen. So I’m hopeful that advances in computer hardware will allow us to run these AI agents completely within our homes.
Of course, these agents will have internet access, but when that access is cut off for some reason, it should still have the ability to do all of its work that doesn’t strictly rely on a net connection.
I’m looking forward to the advent of the real world “Jarvis” and it seems like our hardware and software prowess is just about in the right place for that to happen sooner rather than later.