Democratizing AI: How Arm is putting advanced intelligence into the hands of billions of users

At Arm, we believe AI – and the benefits it provides – should be accessible to as many people as possible. This belief is driving the next chapter of AI, one which is personal, immediately available for users, and increasingly on device.

With Arm technology featuring in 99 percent of all smartphones worldwide, our role in this ongoing “democratization of AI” is critical. Through balancing performance, power and area, our technology powers the mobile platforms that enable advanced intelligence to run efficiently everywhere – not just today’s powerful flagship smartphones but also more affordable mid-range and premium devices.

Delivering on-device AI at this scale means billions of people worldwide experience tangible improvements across the mobile applications they rely on every day, like real-time image and video enhancement, speech recognition, multimodal assistants, translation, smart summaries and image search.

TECNO and Arm: Real-time generative AI on mobile

A clear example of AI democratization in action is Arm’s recent collaboration with TECNO, an OEM focused on delivering advanced mobile technology to users in emerging markets. Arm and TECNO are working together to bring on-device generative AI that powers advanced creativity experiences, like creative style transfer preview and immersive stylization, to its premium and mid-range smartphones.

Generative AI has traditionally faced barriers on mobile due to its high compute intensity, long latency, and reliance on cloud connectivity. However, the Arm TECNO partnership helps to solve these challenges by running generative AI on Armv9 CPUs and then optimizing through Arm KleidiAI to significantly enhance AI capabilities for TECNO’s Edge-Side AI Generated Content (AIGC) Preview Concept Technology, which eliminates flickering and jittering during split-screen viewfinder camera experiences. This integration delivers real-time AI artistic effects in the style transfer preview at 30 frames per second directly in the viewfinder. 

At the core of these improvements is Integer 8-bit Matrix Multiply (i8MM), a hardware instruction extension embedded in Arm CPUs that accelerates General Matrix Multiply (GEMM), the core compute behind most AI workloads. This is especially beneficial for mid-tier and entry-level mobile devices where the CPU is often the primary AI engine. By leveraging i8MM instructions through KleidiAI, the Arm TECNO collaboration accelerates core machine learning (ML) workloads across common frameworks and applications, leading to 30% faster and more efficient AI compute for more responsive creative experiences, such as real-time photo effects, object detection, and augmented reality (AR) features.

The ongoing Arm TECNO collaboration has also led to several key engineering innovations including:

• Intelligent heterogeneous scheduling, which allocates workloads across CPUs to maximize performance and efficiency.
• Model compression and restoration techniques, which allows generative models to run efficiently on Arm CPUs, while preserving artistic quality.
• Real-time fluidity via CPU pipelines, with AI inference migrating to the Arm CPU to achieve video-level preview for creative style transfer, minimizing latency and enabling a responsive viewfinder experience.

As a result of this work, users can preview ideas instantly and experience immersive stylization as they compose.

Armv9 CPUs: Bringing advanced AI to mainstream smartphones

A key enabler of powerful AI capabilities extending to mid-tier and premium smartphones is the growing availability of Armv9 CPUs. This is delivering the AI performance, efficiency, and ecosystem readiness required for democratizing AI capabilities across every tier of the smartphone market, from flagship all the way to entry-level.

On Armv9 CPU-based devices, these benefits show up in the following ways:

• Faster, more efficient AI performance that developers can seamlessly access through KleidiAI;
• Better image processing in camera and computer vision (CV) post-processing pipelines; and
• Faster application launches and improved responsiveness.

Armv9 CPUs are integrated across the widely adopted Arm-powered MediaTek Dimensity platforms, which power millions of mobile devices worldwide. The most recent Dimensity 8500 series push advanced AI even deeper across the mid-range and premium series of smartphones, supporting on-device generative AI workloads like style transfer effects, local language models and creative AI features that were previously reserved for flagship hardware.

Arm KleidiAI: Simplifying AI optimization for mobile developers

However, hardware alone isn’t enough to democratize AI – it also depends on how easily developers can access and use that performance. This is where KleidiAI plays a critical role.

KleidiAI is a suite of optimized AI libraries and tools designed to help developers automatically unlock the performance of Arm CPUs, without requiring any code changes or deep, hardware-specific expertise. With KleidiAI integrated across major AI frameworks, OEMs and a broad developer community have access to a mature, proven ecosystem that bridges the gap between cutting-edge CPU features, like Arm Scalable Matrix Extension 2 (SME2), i8MM and Scalable Vector Extension 2 (SVE2), and real-world applications, with performance benefits that they can access immediately. As a result, many leading global tier-1 applications across social media, shopping, payments, camera, AR, and multimodal, are already benefiting from Armv9 CPU’s AI capabilities.

Enabling intelligence everywhere

Democratizing AI isn’t about a single feature or device. It’s about building a compute foundation that allows intelligence to scale responsibly, efficiently, and universally. That means the AI experiences users care about most – camera pipelines, voice and speech features, and even emerging AIGC workflows – can scale efficiently from premium devices to the broad mid-range and beyond.

By enabling advanced AI capabilities on billions of smartphones through advanced architecture features, software optimizations, deep ecosystem collaboration with partners like MediaTek and TECNO, and decades of engineering innovation, Arm is helping ensure the next era of AI is not exclusive, but shared.

Intelligence everywhere, powered by Arm.