Panos Panay, Amazon’s head of devices and services, believes the reign of the smartphone screen may be nearing a tipping point. Speaking at Fortune Brainstorm AI in San Francisco, he suggested that a growing fatigue with social media “doom scrolling” is paving the way for a new era of “ambient intelligence”—one driven by a generation that interacts with technology in fundamentally different ways,.

According to Panay, the future of consumer technology isn’t about better apps, but about making the technology disappear into the background.

“There’s a whole younger generation coming up that I think at some point they get tired of doom scrolling,” he observed, noting that many young people feel “stuck” when it comes to social media. He argued that this demographic, having been raised in an emerging “AI world,” will demand interactions that bypass the friction of traditional computing.

“They’re going to just think differently,” Panay predicted. “You’ve got to make sure you have products in their pockets, on their bodies, in their homes that they don’t expect… [but] expect to connect seamlessly.”

The death of the ‘app’ experience

Panay described a user experience that eliminates the need to look at a screen to solve daily problems. “It’s such a joy because there’s no opening a phone, opening the app, clicking, finding … none of it,” he said. “You just ask the question and you get it back”.

He illustrated this shift with a personal anecdote about a family debate over which restaurant to visit. Rather than everyone retreating to their corners to stare at their phones—a moment that usually disrupts family connection—they simply asked Alexa. The AI recalled a conversation from months prior regarding a restaurant they had wanted to try, settling the debate instantly. “It’s such a simple, delightful moment of when ambient intelligence is around you,” Panay noted.

To support this screen-free future, Amazon is aggressively experimenting with new hardware. While Panay declined to get into specific product roadmaps, he hinted that the current smart speakers and phones are not the endgame.

“I don’t think we’ve seen the next form factor yet on where AI devices are going to go,” he said, adding that Amazon has a “lab full of ideas,” though most ideas won’t make it from prototype to reality.

When pressed on whether Amazon would release wearables or glasses to compete with recent partnerships like that of OpenAI and Jony Ive’s io, Panay pointed to Amazon’s portfolio, including the recent acquisition of a company that makes a wristband. “We have wearables, we have earbuds, we’ve had glasses in the past.” He added that he won’t reveal what’s coming next, but insisted, “I think you’re going to want your assistant with you everywhere you go.”

Security concerns come hand in hand with these sort of advances, too. When asked by an audience member about the risks of placing listening devices in homes, Panay described security as a non-negotiable agreement. “I feel like it’s a contract with our customers, period. We break that contract, we lose our customers.” He emphasized that Amazon does not “cut one corner” regarding security protocols, describing it as the “first premise” of their product design.

The New ‘Alexa Plus‘

The bridge to this ambient future is the newly updated “Alexa Plus,” which Panay describes as a shift from a command-based tool to a comprehensive “home manager” and “butler.” Unlike “legacy Alexa,” which often required users to navigate complex setups, the new AI possesses “unlimited depth of understanding” and contextual memory.

“If I’ve asked it two or three questions in the last couple of weeks … the understanding, the personality will just change and say it understands what I’m looking for,” he explained.

For Panay, the ultimate goal is to return time to the user, moving them away from the distraction of screens and toward meaningful activity. “I think learning is one of the finest arts on the planet … and I think reading does that,” he said, positioning the shift away from doom scrolling as not just a technological evolution, but a cultural one.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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Beer and wine were major components of the meal. By our standards, peasants drank a lot, although the alcohol content of the beer and wine was lower than today’s versions. They often napped before returning to work. In the evening, they ate a light meal, perhaps only bread, and socialized for a while.

They went to bed within a few hours of darkness, so how long they slept depended on the season. On average, they slept about eight hours, but not consecutively. They awoke after a “first sleep” and prayed, had sex or chatted with neighbors for somewhere between half an hour and two hours, then returned to sleep for another four hours or so.

Peasants did not have privacy as we think of it; everyone often slept in one big room. Parents made love with one another as their children slept nearby. Married couples shared a bed, and one of their younger children might sleep with them, though infants had cradles. Older children likely slept two to a bed.

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For Kiara Nirghin, the 24-year-old co-founder and chief technology officer of the applied AI lab Chima, the narrative that her generation uses artificial intelligence as a cheat code is not just wrong—it ignores a fundamental shift in human cognition.

The Stanford computer science alum and Peter Thiel fellow argued that while older generations view AI as a tool to be adopted, Gen Z views it as a native language. However, this fluency comes with a unique burden: the “AI anxiety” of keeping pace with technology that is currently the “worst” it will ever be.

Speaking at Fortune Brainstorm AI in San Francisco, Nirghin addressed the tension between the perception of Gen Z and their reality as builders. “The truth is the younger generation isn’t adopting AI,” she said. “We’re growing up fluent in AI.” This distinction is critical in the workplace. While a manager might see an employee using an AI agent as cutting corners, Nirghin said she sees a shift in the architecture of work itself.

“We aren’t thinking about coding from scratch,” she explained. “We’re thinking about coding with a coding agent side by side.” Far from being generation shortcut, Gen Z are trailblazers, she argued.

“That fundamentally changes how you write, how you take tests, how you apply to jobs or different applications, because it’s not from the ground up,” Nirghin said about working side by side with an agent. “I think what that really means is that this broad level of use cases and applications we’re seeing is really being pioneered by the younger generation.”

The ‘lazy’ myth vs. deep thinking

One of the most pervasive criticisms of the digital native generation is that reliance on large language models (LLMs) erodes critical thinking skills. Nirghin firmly rejects this. “I think that the biggest misconception is that young people are using AI to not think things through,” she said, that they’re using it “as a shortcut.”

Instead, Nirghin said that intelligent users are leveraging these tools to offload cognitive labor so they can probe complex subjects with greater intensity. She said it’s not as simple as handing off the “cognitive load” to an AI model, it’s about thinking “differently … even “deeper” on a specific subject, because the agent is taking hours of menial work off your hands.

As an example, she pointed to running deep research reports on financial markets that might take hours to generate manually. By automating that work, she said the user is free to analyze the implications rather than just gathering the data. “What does that unlock for you?” she asked the audience, urging them to consider just how much more they can do with these tools at their “fingertips.”

The anxiety of infinite improvement

Nirghin said her generation does face a daunting reality that people don’t appreciate: the relentless speed of obsolescence, and their own awareness of that fact. She said fears over AI have some similarities to “climate anxiety.” Noting that some of her earliest research was about climate change, she explained climate anxiety as the idea that “there’s this movement of climate change coming up and we don’t really know what to do but we know it’s coming and nobody is moving as fast to solve the problem.”

It’s tied to the realization that current technology, as impressive as it seems, is primitive compared to what is coming next. “The models right now are as dumb as they are ever going to be,” Nirghin warned. “It is only going to get faster, more advanced and more intelligent, each and every model from from here on out.”

For Gen Z workers, she said, this creates a pressure environment where staying ahead is a daily requirement. Nirghin noted that recent model releases have “engulfed the benchmarks in such an enormous way” that previous capabilities can now be “10xed” overnight—imagine coming to work tomorrow, able to produce 10 times as much since yesterday. If a worker isn’t consistently on top of these updates, “you’re kind of left behind.” The fear isn’t about taking too many shortcuts, but not figuring out every pathway and every update to hit that 10x.

Taste as the new IQ

If intelligence is being commoditized by models that improve exponentially, what becomes the new metric for human value? According to Nirghin, it is “taste.”

Nirghin, whose background includes work at Stanford’s Human-Centered AI labs, argued that benchmarks around accuracy no longer capture what makes a product successful. She cited the example of coding agents that, without human guidance, might uncontrollably add “sparkle emojis” to a front-end UI because they “love” certain design tropes.

“You know something is vibe coded if you’ve ever sort of worked with a coding agent,” she joked. The differentiator for the future workforce will not be the ability to generate code or text, but the human-centered judgment to determine what users actually want to see. “As models and use cases and efficiencies change,” Nirghin said, “the key differentiator is taste.”

Nirghin’s advice extends beyond her peers to the older generations currently managing them. She stressed that “AI fluency is just as important for people that are already in the workforce,” urging them to arm themselves with tools like ChatGPT or Gemini as daily “co-pilots.”

Ultimately, Nirghin said she views the rapid evolution of AI not as a threat to employment, but as a challenge to adaptation. Whether automating back-office processes or launching “deep research agents,” the economic “unlock” provided by these models is already incredible, even if they never improved again. But the anxiety of keeping up is the new price of admission for the future of work.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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