Washington, DC — By the time the confetti settled at Shoreline Amphitheatre in the San Francisco Bay Area, something was gone.

Not a feature. Not a phone. A philosophy.

From Google CEO Sundar Pichai's first breath to the final slide, Google I/O 2025 was not a developer conference. It was a reorientation. A doubling-down.

There was no pixel tease. No versioned Android release. Just Gemini. Everywhere. In everything. An answer to OpenAI and Microsoft — loud, muscular, cinematic.

But it left behind a question louder than any keynote cheer: at what cost?

"Google is either signalling the end of the smartphone era is near or simply rebranding it by centering I/O 2025 on AI?" Zane Riedel, a San Francisco-based AI strategist and futurist, told TRT World.

The agent eats the OS

For the first time in its history, Google didn't utter the word "Android" as a versioned release. The absence wasn't oversight. It was theatre.

In its place: Gemini 2.5 — a new kind of intelligence that doesn't sit inside your phone but hovers around your life.

It writes your code. Schedules your travel. Mocks up your slide deck. Translates your voice — live — in another language. Holds a conversation like a friend. Beats Pokémon Blue, if you're bored.

It's not an app. It's not even an assistant. It's what Google calls an agent.

But when your agent reads your files, anticipates your needs, edits your documents, and reasons through your day, where, exactly, does your autonomy go?

"Google isn't abandoning hardware," Riedel says. "It's rebranding it as a seamless AI interface — where smartphones become AI conduits across cars, glasses, even living rooms. Gemini is the OS now."

From search bar to sentience

Going forward, Google wants Gemini to shape how you search. It won't just return results — it shall interrogate your query, thread sub-questions, compose answers stitched from memory and inference.

They call it "AI Mode." It feels more like a filter laid across reality — predictive, generative, and oddly decisive.

Soon, it will "check its work," they say.

No method is shown, and at this point, it is just a promise. And this is where it starts to blur.

Google isn't asking you to use AI. It's asking you to think through it.

A movie studio, inside your browser

Google had lots to showcase at I/O 2025. For instance: Flow. A text-to-video engine that shoots your words like a script — characters, lighting, dialogue. You imagine it. It renders it.

Then Veo 3: physics-based, realism-rich, chaos-inflected short films. Google’s answer to OpenAI’s Sora.

And Beam — formerly Project Starline — now a multilingual, real-time video call tool that translates your voice into your own accent in another language. It doesn’t caption. It performs.

All roads led back to Gemini. The writer. The translator. The director.

Smartphone era renamed

That is the thinking at the heart of this pivot. If Android has been reduced to plumbing, what's the phone now?

A host? A shell? A screen through which the agent speaks?

This isn't the death of the smartphone as such. But it's no longer the star.

The star is the system behind the screen — server-bound, cloud-fed, memory-rich. The thing that answers before you finish asking. The thing that builds with you, for you, maybe through you.

"Gemini 2.5's reasoning and creativity, showcased via Jules or Flow, mark real progress," says Riedel. "But we're still a few years from fully safe, universally reliable systems."

He warns that while tools like Astra offer contextual awareness and persistence, "they work best in controlled environments — like generating a quiz or summarising a paper — not in complex, ambiguous scenarios where human ethics still matter most."

 He estimates "three to five years" before consumer-grade agents can act unsupervised. "We're close — but not close enough to stop asking questions."

A rebrand and an inflection

Google isn't becoming an AI company. Experts say it already is one.

But in trying to outgun OpenAI and Microsoft, it has bet the house on a single idea: that the future isn't a product, it's a relationship. With a model. With an agent.

What used to be a device in your hand is now an intelligence in your shadow. And that's the gamble.

Because if Gemini is the new interface — the layer between us and how we work, search, speak, even think — then this isn't just a product launch.

It's tech's new inflection point.

A shift as deep as the birth of the smartphone. One where platforms blur and interfaces dissolve.

"My take-away here is that AI is becoming the operating system of everything. And once that transition begins, there's no going back," Riedel concludes.