For a company chief executive, predicting the future goes with the territory. If that company sells technology, like Qualcomm, which makes processors for smartphones, tablets, computers, cars and smart glasses, for instance, that challenge is tougher, when change comes at a dizzying pace, as it does when AI plays its part.
At Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon Summit, I sat down with CEO Cristiano Amon to ask how the company has predicted things right and where things are going.
Despite such a frenetic time, when I met Amon he was confident and relaxed. He had just announced a series of new processors which he hopes will continue to keep Qualcomm in demand for manufacturers from Samsung to Xiaomi, Motorola to Meta.
When it comes to predicting the future, Qualcomm’s ability to see where the smartphone was going, stretches back to when Qualcomm introduced mobile broadband, he told me.
“When we designed mobile broadband in the company a while ago, in the early 2000s, we said if you bring mobile broadband to a cellphone, the phone will become a computer,” he said. “That's going to be the evolution of personal computing and everything is going to change.”
What followed was the beginning of the smartphone revolution with operating systems, app stores, touchscreens and more. “I feel the same analogy with AI,” Amon went on. “It's been an exercise in futility to talk about whether or not AI is going to be on the phone and in the car. Humans are going to access AI through all their devices. So those large language models and AI can become the new user interface.”
This was part of Qualcomm’s keynote, led by Amon. Agentic AI is becoming more commonplace. This is where instead of using apps to get things done, you talk or type to the phone’s AI agent and it does the heavy lifting.
Large language models have become multimodal (that is, they respond to voice as easily as text, for instance), so agents can plan and execute tasks.
“The first instantiation of AI was a first-party application,” he said, with the manufacturers like Samsung and Google having their own AI features, “but AI is now becoming third party,” he said, with apps in App Stores driving the changes.
“It’s not about helping you operate your phone. That's very narrow. It’s about something much broader,” he said. “How are you going to make payments? How will you organise your calendar? People will have the agents do things on our behalf.”
When AI acts for us, how much control should we retain? One of Qualcomm’s demonstrations showed an agent could, for example, work out how to buy something while reminding the user of their other intentions for spending their money.
The capability represented great personalisation but, I suggested, could cross a line where an AI that appears helpful can eventually become intrusive.
Amon said trust and user control will be fundamental. “There’s a higher level of maturity today,” he explained. “AI has to be more precise and way faster than you doing it yourself. Otherwise, you just do it yourself,” he reasoned.
That principle also explains why Amon thinks agentic AI will eventually change behaviour rather than simply becoming another feature on existing devices.
“There's going to be a moment. We're very close to it,” he said. “Certain functions will mean the human is going to say, ‘I just want the AI to do it for me.’ ” Once that happens, the transformation will accelerate.
“Eventually, you're going to have the flip, where some of those agentic experiences are going to be a better way to use the computer. We are entering the phase of co-existence, and then eventually some of those agentic experiences will completely replace the old way of doing things.”
Banking used to mean going into a branch and speaking to a teller, many routine banking tasks are now handled on a phone. “This concept of relying on an AI agent to buy, pay or transfer money is now such that you can easily see it can be open and distributed across everything you do,” he said. “But it’s not going to happen with everything at the same time, it’s going to happen with certain things.” People will still say they’ll stick to apps instead of agents for some processes.
The speed of this transformation presents Qualcomm with its own challenge. The company designs chips years ahead of products reaching consumers, while AI development can change dramatically in weeks. How does Qualcomm stay ahead, I wondered?
“We are actually in the gladiator business in the phone market,” he said. “If we get it wrong, we lose. All those phones. And if we get it right, we just have to do it again. If you're a gladiator, you go to the Colosseum. You have three possible outcomes: you live, you die, or you both die. And if you live, the only thing you will accomplish is you can go to the Colosseum one more time.”
Technology has always moved quickly, and Qualcomm's survival has depended on its willingness to reinvent itself, it seems.
“We survived since the very beginning,” he said. “And I think it's about having the ability to transform the company. To not be afraid of taking risks and having to reinvent our platforms at the time.”
AI, however, makes predictions tougher than ever. “Anybody that tells you, ‘Oh yeah, we already figured out who the winners and losers of AI,’ they're probably going to be wrong,” Amon said. “We're still in the early stages.”
For Qualcomm, the future means taking one kind of tech and matching it with another.
“One of the things we're talking about in the keynote is that we're going to bring some of the technologies we develop for data centres into phones,” Amon said, commenting on how the scale of AI models running on devices has already changed dramatically.
“We started several years ago. We showed a one billion parameter model running on a phone, and everybody was impressed. Now, Qualcomm is talking about models with 30 billion parameters, and potentially much larger models in the future. “We may have to go to hundred billion,” he said.
Which leads us to another major issue for the smartphone industry: cost. Premium smartphones have become increasingly important, while memory prices have risen sharply as demand from AI data centres has grown.
Amon said the premiumisation of smartphones is partly because people rely on phones for increasingly important activities. “Your next phone is always a better phone. So, what happened? We have seen as society becomes more mature, we see this behavior where things move up and the smartphone today is actually the number one consumer purchase decision,” he said.
“In some cases now, we have our mass tier phone chips running in laptops,” Amon said. “Because phones are becoming more powerful than laptops.”
But memory prices are creating a different problem.
“Memory went up 5x, 6x because of data centre growth and the desire for memory,” he said, arguing that the resulting increase in component costs is affecting affordability.
“The phone market is down 20% year over year,” he pointed out. “The reason is because prices are up.”
Qualcomm is also continuing to customise chips for individual manufacturers, something Amon said will remain important as devices become increasingly differentiated. With the introduction of the new processors, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6, there was no mention of bespoke models – recent smartphones for Samsung have had names that ended “For Galaxy,” for instance. But such versions will still happen.
“In the age of AI and agentic experience, you're starting to see devices being designed for that transition,” he said. “I would expect that you're going to have different configurations.”
Foldable phones are another example. Qualcomm has supplied processors for foldables from the beginning, and Amon sees the challenge as being partly about fitting increasingly powerful computing into increasingly constrained hardware.
“The compute density will be important,” he said. “And it will become even more important for devices like smart glasses.” Smart glasses are a hot topic right now, especially concerning the possibility of covert filming, making some even call them pervert glasses. Qualcomm doesn’t make smart glasses, but it makes the chips that power them, so I’m interested in Amon’s take on the current issue.
“I have been a big believer and fan of glasses because I think glasses are prime real estate,” he said. “It's sitting on the bridge of your nose, close to eyes, ear, and mouth, so when you think about AI as a new user interface, the ability to see what you see, read what you read, the ability to deal with audio is important.”
Amon pointed out that people take photos and video using phones all the time already, so maybe glasses aren’t that different.
“Let's go back to this matter of trust. It's a very difficult thing because everybody carries a camera today. Everybody carries it. It's just going to change in the form factor,” he said. It’s a view I agree with, that the more we become familiar with the idea that there is a flashing light front-and-centre on smart specs when you’re shooting video, and that the light cannot be hidden without disabling the camera or in some cases bricking the glasses, the more we will learn to relax about smart glasses. But Amon has another answer.
“It may be a different answer when you think about the future,” he began. “Take 6G technology. Right now, 5G enables high-definition video streaming to become mainstream. You can stream YouTube and TV series and movies to your phone with very high quality.
“You couldn't do it in 4G. With 4G you could stream music, but not with video. You can with 5G and 6G is the next stage. You'll be able to upload high-speed video all the time if you want to. So, you're asking me a question about people taking photos with their glasses, but 6G technology is designed to make all of us a walking camera in this world.”
While that may alarm some, Amon is focusing on how the cameras can collect data for AI models rather than taking photos. “You'll be able to have the capability to see what I see for those models. Those are going to be very useful for you to have context to allow AI models to do a bunch of different things. So, I think that it’s more difficult to answer this question as the technology evolves and you're going to have to probably rely on the regulatory framework to put the boundaries in place.”
In some respects, he pointed out, glasses could be more natural than speaking to a phone and as AI becomes increasingly agentic, he expects more functions to migrate from smartphones to glasses.
“I don't think there's anything that is going to get as much scale as glasses,” Amon said. That’s down to convenience and just as the smartphone changed things by putting a computer into pockets, he now sees AI changing computing again, by allowing technology to understand what we see, hear and want – and to act for us more and more.
The next big change is about changing the relationship between people and computers. “AI is the new UI,” Amon said.
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