OnePlus AI strategist Arthur Lam: Smartphones need personalisation, not 'Frankenstein' features

From personalisation to building multimodal AI tools, OnePlus is gearing up for its next phase of AI revamp. In a recent interaction with Fortune India's Vidhi Taparia, Arthur Lam, product director of OxygenOS and AI strategy at OnePlus, shared insights into the company’s AI ambitions. Lam explains why smartphones, which seem to have entered a phase of commoditisation, need not become ‘Frankenstein products’ that try to do everything. In the era of AI, he says, utility and personalisation take precedence over the all-in-one approach. Edited excerpts.

Taparia: What does OnePlus's AI roadmap look like over the next 12 months, and which areas is it prioritising for deeper integration?

Lam: We started our AI journey in 2024 when we launched AI image modification tools with our OnePlus Nord 4 device and, since then, we’ve launched a range of features that can also understand your written and audio content and help modify and improve them too.

Together, these tools are known as multimodal AI tools, and they’re a core part of OnePlus AI, so we’re continuing to improve these and will be launching new versions over the coming months,” Lam says.

But as well as that, we’ll also be focused on really making your phone’s artificial intelligence personal to our users - we believe that if your phone is going to act on your behalf, it really needs to understand you. That will unlock huge possibilities for us and our users, meaning in the future AI may be able to help you more at your work, while you’re gaming or while you’re travelling.

Taparia: What patterns are you seeing in how OnePlus users are engaging with AI features today, and what surprised you the most from that usage data?

Lam: OnePlus users are starting to integrate artificial intelligence into their daily lives, using multimodal tools to improve their writing and photography. This is really encouraging for us, as is the fact that users are now telling us they want to purchase our devices because of our AI features. But they also expect AI to do more complex tasks and take more personal actions for them, which is why we believe personal intelligence on your phone is such a game-changer.

Users are also asking for help to juggle personal information and data they have stored across different apps. This is a huge challenge for AI but one we’ve started to address with Plus Mind, our new Personal Intelligence tool to help users remember everything. It has been tailored specifically to solve a problem our users face - the tidal wave of content they deal with every day.

Taparia: Smartphones are often seen as having hit a commoditisation phase. Do you believe AI can break that cycle and become a true differentiator, or is it already becoming table stakes?

Lam: It is easy for brands to gather a range of AI tools together and call it a strategy. And an approach of this nature can hasten commoditisation.

At OnePlus we want to do artificial intelligence differently - we believe AI offers almost unlimited possibilities, so it is important not to make a ‘Frankenstein product’ that tries to do everything. Instead, we believe that the AI era demands truly distinct products that have been developed thoughtfully and deliberately, hand in hand with our users.

That’s how we developed OnePlus 13s and our new Plus Mind personal intelligence experience. Our users told us they want to be able to easily store and recall fragmented bits of information they see across their day, and they can send information to Plus Mind in an instant by using our dedicated Plus Key and then recall it later in an easily searchable way.

Taparia: What will it take for AI to move beyond gimmicks and change user behaviour?

Lam: We don’t believe users need to change their behaviour to get the best from artificial intelligence - we believe AI should help solve their daily problems instead. We work hand in hand with our users to understand their lifestyles and design products that complement their lives. For example, our users asked us to focus on finding smarter ways they can work with international colleagues who speak different languages, so we developed AI Voicescribe and AI Translation, two tools that harness the power of artificial intelligence, to help them work smarter.

Taparia: Is OnePlus exploring the development of its own foundational AI models, or is the focus more on refining on-device AI performance using partnerships and optimisation?

Lam: OnePlus AI uses a range of different models to bring a range of the best AI experiences to our users. We believe OnePlus users are best served by having access to all the best AI experiences on the market rather than being tied to any one specific ecosystem, especially when features are so quick to develop and implement.