The luxury phone has always sold status, not specs. The British brand Vertu now goes a step further: for 6,880 dollars (about 6,300 euros) it offers a foldable phone wrapped in calf leather and titanium, in a box that looks more like a jewellery case than phone packaging. But the real pitch isn't the leather. Vertu is betting that executives will pay for artificial intelligence to run their working day.

The device is called Alphafold, and at its heart sits Hermes - an AI agent built in, based on the open-source project of the same name. Unlike the usual assistants that just answer questions, Hermes is meant to carry out multi-step tasks for you: read contracts, analyse spreadsheets, book travel and, when it gets stuck, hand the task off to a human concierge. The hardware is the excuse. The agent is the product.

When someone asks you to test the promise, the best thing is to take it at face value and make the agent do real executive work - book a business trip, summarise quarterly results, redirect a call while you drive to the airport. And here the picture gets far less shiny than the marketing.

In a test with a simulated pre-flight delay, Hermes sent the message and switched on „do not disturb” mode, but didn't launch the navigation on its own, and the reminder it set for nine at night instead of in 15 minutes. Asked to organise a flight from Mumbai to Pune, the agent entered an appointment in the calendar for the wrong dates and offered a button to forward the request to the concierge. The spreadsheet it was supposed to „remember” the next day - it forgot, and asked to be re-attached. An ambitious assistant, yes. A finished one, no.

For comparison, the same tasks on a rival foldable running Gemini went differently: instead of acting blindly, the AI asked before proceeding - which airport, where to save the reminder - and in the end gave a more accurate result. Hermes was more willing to act on its own, but that very autonomy often produced incomplete or wrong outcomes. The question that remains is as old as the agents themselves: when should the machine act alone, and when should it ask.

There's also a more awkward side. Under the leather, the Alphafold looks uncannily like the ZTE Nubia Fold - a phone that costs 1,100 dollars - from the hinge design to the speaker layout and the fingerprint reader, and the system information reveals ZTE identifiers in the software. Asked about it, Vertu admitted the device was developed through a partnership with ZTE/Nubia for the hardware platform, and that they lay claim to the leather, the software and the service. This isn't new - the same story repeated with the brand's earlier models going back to 2023.

So what are you actually buying for 6,300 euros? Craft, leather, a name and an ecosystem of AI services glued onto an already existing phone platform. The specialist agents for legal advice and investment - by their own admission - should be treated as a starting point, not an authority, since the answers remain AI-generated and must be independently verified. Even the option to call a real concierge says it all: when the AI reaches its edge, the human steps back into the picture. Technology changes, but the word „luxury” still means you pay more for less.