Since the advent of AI, smartphone makers have been on a never-ending race to equip their phones with the best possible AI tools and capabilities. From Google Gemini to Perplexity AI and even an upcoming Gemini-powered Siri, AI has been slowly taking over smartphones. Now, the next wave of smartphone AI is coming in the form of Agentic Assistants and it looks like Tecno is going to take the lead with OpenClaw.
Tecno and OpenClaw Transform Ella AI into EllaClaw
In a new report, Android Authority has gained exclusive insights into Tecno's plans of equipping its in-house Ella AI with agentic assistant capabilities. For this, the brand has partnered with the popular AI agentic platform OpenClaw and it will soon rename Ella AI to EllaClaw.
For those unaware, launched in January 2026, OpenClaw was born out of a GitHub project of Peter Steinberger, who managed to create an online forum where AI chatbots could interact with each other like humans. It was initially called Moltbot and made waves on the internet.
The newest avatar is OpenClaw, which is an open agent platform that runs on any machine and can automate work from chat apps like WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, Slack, Teams and more to create an AI workflow, completely automated and devoid of any friction.
Now, with Tecno being the first major smartphone brand to incorporate OpenClaw on a system-level, it essentially means that every future Tecno phone will serve as an agentic AI workflow and it will only evolve from there, towards a true AI-based system and software.
As for how it will work, the report states that OpenClaw on Tecno phones will operate on a tri-permission state. This means that EllaClaw will work with three levels of permission execution - basic task automation, background activity and scheduling and automating app tasks like SMS, Gallery and more.
This deep-state integration will mean that OpenClaw will have access to all sorts of information and data inside Tecno phones. It is no doubt this is very ingraned data collection, processing and optimiation. However, since all of these tasks will happen on-device, users will not have to worry about cloud processing or data mishandling.
That said, at the time of writing, EllaClaw is in beta stage and Android Authority has gained access to the agentic AI bot. It is unclear when Tecno will openly roll out EllaClaw and which future phones will come equipped with this new Ella AI avatar. However, it is clear that Tecno is moving towards an AI-automated future and its smartphone users are going to become the first mass-market pool to gain access.
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