Tech··11 min
Running AI Agents On-Device: The 2026 Stack
The cloud round-trip is the bottleneck for agents, not model quality. On-device time-to-first-token runs 15 to 80 ms against 180 to 600 ms in the cloud, and a single agent task chains 10 to 30 model calls. Here's what shipping a local agent on Apple, Qualcomm, and Google silicon actually looks like in 2026.
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