If there’s one thing I learned on my trip to Maui, it’s that I’m not the best at planning ahead. When my trip to Haleakalā National Park got derailed by getting supplies, it left me wishing I had a sophisticated AI agent to help me manage my time — especially in an unfamiliar setting.
I’d been thinking about AI all day as I drove and hiked up the mountain. I heard the phrase Agentic AI repeated over the previous days at the Snapdragon Summit in October, hundreds feet from Maui’s scenic beaches. Qualcomm execs painted a picture of a future where a phone’s on-device AI answers your questions after consulting info from your apps, like Siri on steroids.
No, supercharged Agentic AI assistants won’t be in next year’s Android phones — not even the top-tier models packing a Snapdragon 8 Elite chip. But expect to hear Qualcomm’s new buzzword more in 2025. The execs spoke of a future years down the road when AI technology had matured to where it could distill data from your apps and network of devices to provide info with personal results. The building blocks are already being laid for this capability, with Galaxy AI in Samsung phones, Google Gemini extensions and Siri’s understanding of personal context in Apple Intelligence (which will be coming in future updates).
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Plenty of things can change from idea to implementation – and with only a year of on-device AI smartphones (or a few weeks for the recent iPhones that just got Apple Intelligence), we’ll take these phone prognostications with grains of salt. But much like how I toyed with the idea of on-device AI during my drive through Maui’s Road to Hana last year, I was intrigued by how the concept of AI “agents” could help me on another adventure.
On the road from the town of Kahului, past the airport and up to the Haleakalā National Park.
AI agents could juggle last-minute tasks on the road
I had a day to visit Haleakalā national park and ascend its titular peak. I’d done some basic research on the park and came up with an ambitious circular route chaining together hikes that I was eager to try. But I wondered it I had the time for this trek after driving from the town of Kahului near the airport.
There’s always travel pressure to fit in everything you can, and I made the fateful choice to try to grab a bite at Sam Sato’s, a legendary noodle and BBQ shop that would make for a fun trail meal. Sadly, the restaurant was inexplicably closed. That meant I had to scramble to grab a few things on the road before driving 1.5 hours to the park. What followed was a mad digital scramble on my phone as I searched for food (found a wonderful banh mi place), a grocery store (for water) and then a route to the park.
If the promises of AI agents are to be believed, I could’ve saved time by asking a digital helper to make an itinerary based on my needs and route. In theory, the AI agent would dive into Yelp, my maps app and online searches to give me a path to grab food and supplies while saving time. Ideally, it would check weather reports to provide advice on what to pack, as the higher altitudes of Haleakalā can be 20 degrees F cooler than the beach. I could kind of do this with Google Gemini, though it took a few rounds of asking follow-up questions. Ultimately, I’d want to get this full travel itinerary after asking a single question.
The lush but still warm and dry trail of Hosmer Grove, a lovely starting stroll through the woods.
What can I do with my time on the mountain?
I reached the entry gate to Haleakalā National Park at 11 a.m. and was informed that Hosmer Grove was just ahead. It was a short hike at a reasonable altitude that set the tone for the rest of the day. Alpine trees, verdant ridges and brightly-plumed birds adorned this lovely walk before I got back in my car to head to the western half of the park’s visitor center.
Here’s where I could’ve asked my AI agent whether my ambitious hiking plan would be derailed by delays. In my ideal scenario, an AI agent would be able to go into the AllTrails hiking app I used and download the appropriate maps. Since it’s a subscription service, a smart AI agent would also scour the web for reviews about whether the $36 annual fee ($3 per month) is worth it.
Luckily, human knowledge helped me in ways that today’s AI assistants can’t. A nice national park guide laid out an itinerary with segments of the hikes that were nearer the road. That way, I could see parts of the park while driving to reach the top of Haleakalā by sunset. Most importantly, she told me to get to the peak’s parking lot by 4 p.m. to ensure I got a spot.
Something I didn’t realize was that the very same visitor center had been closed the day before, presumably due to a nearby fire. Hopefully, my AI agent would have warned me if the visitor center would be closed.
At the start of the Halema’uma’u trail, which was still dry before I made my descent to the misty lower parts of the hike.
AI agents on the wet, elevated trail
My first big route was on the Halema’uma’u Trail, a hike around the rim of a crater through wet conditions. At that high up the mountain, incoming trade winds turn to mist and bathe the ferns and brush. I started my day in a hotel near a Maui beach and, hours later, I was in a rainforest.
As I hike, I think about other things Agentic AI could help with. Could it tell me whether or not to look at an incoming Slack message or email, despite being thousands of feet above sea level? Heck, can it help me write this story as I walk, inserting relevant tidbits from where I am on the trail?
Sadly, I only got a mile into the hike before I needed to turn back and drive higher up the mountain.
What can AI agents do with satellite data?
I made a brief stop at the Leleiwi Overlook to watch rolling clouds coming up the mountain, which is where my phone’s signal started going in and out. Last year, my Road to Hana drive was almost entirely without signal, and I pondered how on-device AI could help me navigate, check current conditions, look up nearby shops and more even when cut off from mobile data. How will AI agents help when you’re bouncing between signal and dead space (say, underground or on a network’s outskirts)?
My hypothetical met reality when I reached the last area before Haleakalā’s peak and headed down the Sliding Sands trail, which took me into a rust-red desert landscape that felt like I was hiking on Mars. I wasn’t far into my walk when I completely lost signal. That’s where my iPhone 15 Pro Max kicked in Apple’s secret weapon: satellite texting.
I’ve luckily never had to use Apple’s Emergency SOS feature, which routes messages through Globalstar’s satellite network to emergency services. But just a few months ago, Apple activated simple text messaging through its SOS platform. I held my iPhone up to the sky and, once connected to a satellite, successfully texted my editor Patrick Holland. I immediately felt safer, especially when I hiked a little further and hit a point where nobody else was coming along, reaching the complete silence of a true alien world.
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But I still imagined what AI agents could do in combination with satellite connectivity. For instance, which of my phone apps relied on strong signal, and which could be used without it? Which audio options do I have, including my downloaded songs and podcasts between my many apps? And once satellite connectivity becomes more supported and omnipresent, which apps can I still use with the limited signal satellites currently provide?
In the noiseless expanse, I wonder what happens if I were to get hurt. Could an AI agent take the initiative to summon medical advice? Could it provide first aid tips, or surface those suggestions from an app I downloaded years ago that’s been gathering digital dust in the back of my phone? I’ll say this about having a library of decade-old forgotten apps: at least they don’t become useless without a subscription.
I descended far enough that the rolling mists swarmed around me, looking like if the Scottish moors were teleported to the red planet, and turned back to hit my final destination – thankfully on time.
A view from the top of Haleakalā, 10,023 feet above sea level.
A Hawaiian sunset and tomorrow’s AI
I slip into the parking lot of Haleakalā’s peak around 4:30 p.m. and dip into the enclosed viewing area, partially to read the informational placards about the mountain’s history but also to escape the biting winds. At 10,032 feet, even the sweatshirt and windbreaker I had weren’t enough to keep me warm – another thing an AI agent could’ve warned me about.
My original ambitious plan was to hike over 11 miles in one day, and I’d managed just under five. Most of the people gathered on the ridge around me simply drove up the mountain – there’s a road from the park’s entrance to the peak’s parking lot – and I was glad to get even a portion of my trip in. Time, then, is what advanced AI could conceivably have given me, doing all the “bonus brain” calculations I inefficiently did on the fly to eke out a few more miles and make the most of the daylight.
The day was cloudy, and at that altitude, they were blanketed out hundreds of feet below, blocking views of the distant beaches and beyond, to where the Pacific Ocean meets the sky. Among other patient sunset pilgrims, I watched as the heavens turn pink.
A view from the peak of Haleakalā as the sun dips below the horizon.
As I take what’s probably my final selfie of the day, sitting on the rocky peak of Haleakalā itself over 10,000 feet in the air, I realize something else — not Agentic AI in the future, but something next year’s phones with the Snapdragon 8 Elite could help with. My face is in shadow with the setting sun behind me — perfect for the artificial light feature that got way less attention than the flashier AI perks Qualcomm boasted about on the Snapdragon Summit stage days before.
Eventually, the development of AI will get us to the point where agents can quickly solve the obstacles I ran into all day. But I’m still waiting for when it’s knowledgeable enough to provide the nuanced responses that saved my trip — the ones coming from the kind and experienced national park guide who sketched out a perfect itinerary given my constraints and what most park visitors want to see. Even with all the AI hype, I’m still reliant on and grateful for the people who’ve helped me in the right place at the right time.
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