Your phone transcribed a call this afternoon. Then it tidied up an email and sorted a few hundred photos while you weren’t looking. (This particular day is invented, but if you carry a recent flagship, it probably isn’t far off.) Around six, the battery’s in the red. You set it on a Qi wireless charging pad, go cook dinner, and come back to find it’s barely moved.
The pad isn’t faulty, and neither is the phone. They’re just being asked to do far more than they were three years ago.
AI Phones Are Now the Norm
Counterpoint Research’s June 2026 forecast puts GenAI-capable phones at 45% of global shipments this year. That’s up from 36% in 2025, and the share should reach 52% in 2027. Research director Tarun Pathak added a telling caveat: the feature is now standard on high-end phones, but it hasn’t yet given people a compelling reason to upgrade.
Put simply, the hardware got here before the habit did.
It got here fast, too. Counterpoint counted more than 500 million GenAI phones shipped by Q3 2025, and the category had only launched in late 2023. That’s an enormous number of phones running AI, and most owners still charge them the way they always have.
So Where Does the Battery Go?
It’s a fair question, and the honest answer is that nobody really knows the full picture. No one has published a clean, industry-wide number for what AI features cost a battery. The percentages you’ll see on blogs are all over the place, so be wary of any figure that sounds too tidy.
There’s narrower evidence, though, and it holds up. In a 2026 arXiv paper called “Keyword Matters,” researchers measured actual power draw on a Google Pixel 9a and an Orange Pi 5 Pro while small language models ran locally. They changed just one instruction word in otherwise identical prompts. For text generation, decode energy moved by as much as 18.5% below or 26.5% above each model’s average. Even your phrasing has an energy cost.
The phone’s workload keeps growing in other ways too. Pair it with AI glasses or a pendant, and the phone is usually thinking. In most wearable AI agent setups, the wearable collects sight and sound while the agent runs on the handset or a server.
All of that means more top-ups. And a lot of them happen at a desk or on a nightstand, which is exactly where wireless pads tend to sit.
A Quick Look at How Qi Works
Nearly every pad you can buy follows the same standard. Qi comes from the Wireless Power Consortium, which got started in 2008, and it moves power through induction. A big coil in the pad creates a magnetic field. A smaller coil inside the phone catches it and turns it back into current. Anker’s guide counts more than 351 manufacturers working with the standard, Apple, Google and Samsung among them.
It only works if two things are true. The phone needs Qi support, and the coils need to line up. If you set the phone slightly off-center, charging slows down or stops completely.
Beyond that, it mostly comes down to alignment and heat.
Each Generation Gets Faster
| Version | Peak power | What changed |
| Traditional Qi | Up to 7.5W on iPhones, up to 15W on some Android phones | Phone had to sit precisely on the pad |
| Qi2 (2023) | 15W | Magnetic alignment, based on Apple’s MagSafe |
| Qi2 25W (2025) | 25W | Nearly 70% more power than the original Qi2 |
The consortium’s own pitch is that a Qi2 25W charger can take a compatible phone from empty to 50% in about half an hour. It’s the standards body talking up its own spec, so treat that as the best case. The spec launched in July 2025 with only fourteen certified devices, and several hundred more were waiting for testing. If you want the full speed, look for the Qi2 25W label on both the phone and the pad. An older Qi or Qi2 phone will still charge on one, just at whatever speed it supports.
Here’s where it gets interesting. A faster pad isn’t automatically the right match for a phone that leans hard on AI. Wireless charging gives off heat, and a phone that gets warm cuts its own charging power to protect itself. So a phone that has spent the past hour running models could be the one that gets the least out of a 25W pad. Nobody has measured that directly, but the physics points that way.
A Cable Still Has Its Place
Anker sorts the main types of chargers into six groups, covering USB-C wall bricks, power banks, car chargers, and desktop stations. Its range for wireless pads is 5W to 20W. It also notes that wireless pads generally lag behind wired charging, and a thick case slows them further.
The fix is to give each charger its own job. Leave the slow, idle hours to the pad, like overnight or a long stretch at your desk. When you need a real boost, say in the twenty minutes before your next meeting, plug in.
Getting Your Setup Right
Start with your phone’s spec sheet. Support for Qi2 and Qi2 25W varies from model to model, so check the label on the box instead of guessing.
If charging still seems sluggish, take the case off and try again. Thick cases, metal backs and magnetic add-ons all interfere with the connection. Test the pad with a bare phone before you write it off.
The adapter matters more than people think. Plug a good pad into a weak or mismatched power brick, and it will never reach its rated speed.
Heat is the last thing to rule out. If charging keeps pausing after a long session of AI features, let the phone cool for a few minutes, then see how the pad does.
Phones will keep picking up new AI features whether we asked for them or not. You don’t get much say in that. You do get to choose the charger, though, and it’s worth choosing well.
Related: What Does mAh Mean on a Power Bank? Real Capacity Explained
