Breaking down the chip that is running your whole life with Don McGuire | Makna Talks x Qualcomm

Well, we see it everywhere now. We see it on at least whenever Manchester United's not winning.

We are probably facing the biggest technology inflection point since the smartphone. And that's AI.

Well, we're super excited about our opportunity. We are one of the only companies that can have technology that lives in something as small and tiny as an earbud and a ring, to a pair of glasses, to a phone, to a PC, to a car, to an AI box, to an on-prem device, to a data center rack. So we're one of the only companies that has that.

Quite a while. Don McGuire, Chief Marketing Officer of Qualcomm. Happy to be here. How are you? I'm very happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

Not too bad. No, it's not too bad. I haven't been outside a lot, but it's not too bad. And it's been hot everywhere. It's been hot at home. I was just a week in Hawaii for a Snapdragon Summit. It was hot and humid there. So, it's been hot.

First time here. Yes.

I do quite a lot of traveling.

Yeah, 41st year.

Yes, he uses that often.

Well, it's actually a great analogy for Qualcomm. You know, we've been a company that's evolved over the past 40 years. We have fought many battles in the spirit of democratizing technology, and that's always been our mission. We believe that creating amazing technology and then seeing what people do with it is the best way to nurture innovation. And that sometimes resonates well with people and sometimes it doesn't. And so along that journey, we have fought some pretty big battles against some large adversaries. And so I think that's part of the DNA. The second part is we're in some pretty competitive businesses. And just because you win one battle doesn't mean that you've won the war. And so I think the whole analogy of a gladiator is what you get when you win in the coliseum is you get the right to come back and fight again. And so that's sort of the crux of the analogy that he uses. It's like the only thing we won was the right to come back and do it again. And I think the underlying message is don't rest on your laurels, right? Don't get complacent because you never know when things are going to change. And I think that spirit is really good and it's healthy.

Yeah. I mean, well, I've been at the company for 10, and CMO for five. But I've always been in technology. I've been a tech marketer pretty much. I started in sales. And then moved over into marketing early on in my career. But what I love about it is that it's always changing. Technology is always evolving and it doesn't get boring. Now there are challenges that come along with that as well. Trying to take something that's oddly complex and make it simple for people and translating that whether your audience is a business or an end consumer. So that's always challenging for any tech brand, explaining technology can be hard. But it's always evolving. And your point about over the last 40 years there's been a lot of technology brands. And I think what's great about Qualcomm is that we are always looking ahead. We invest in the next technology curve as much as 10 years ahead of when it's anticipated to come. Now, that's a lot of R&D and a lot of money spent, but it's good that we do because by the time it comes, we have the know-how, the knowledge, and we kind of know how to execute in the marketplace. So, I think that's another good aspect of our DNA is that we invest ahead of the curve.

Oh my lord. Okay. So there was no discussion. In 2016, and again it's probably less to do about AI itself because AI has been around for a long time. People called it machine learning back in the day. But our company at that point in time was very, very focused on communications and enabling connectivity. So the big conversation around 2016 was the upcoming transition to 5G. And so that's where a lot of our effort was spent because it was really 5G that sort of enabled this massive bandwidth growth and data explosion that has then led to the AI revolution. But we've been researching and developing and commercializing AI technology for 14 years.

Well, exactly. Not a lot of people crack open.

That is true. You can't. And you know, people don't crack open for fun. But we see it everywhere though. You see it on at least whenever Manchester United's not winning or winning or playing, competing. Well, the women are winning. It's on them, too. But you know where I see them first? I see them first at Mercedes.

Well, it's the biggest challenge as a CMO is I market a product that you can't go into a store and buy. Now in the case of a PC, Intel did a glorious job for 25 years of making something on the inside matter. And so when people went shopping for a PC, the thing that they looked for first was the chip, right? Does it have Intel inside? So there have been case studies through history where you can market something on the inside and make it relevant. And our opportunity is much broader than that because Snapdragon lives in so many different product categories. But if you take that concept of Intel inside from the 80s, 90s and early 2000s and you apply it to today's world and you build upon it, that's kind of where we're at. And so it's a challenge, but it's an opportunity. And by building that affinity, by educating people that what's inside matters and when they're going to buy their next device to ask that question or to look for that Snapdragon on the inside, we actually build, from a business perspective, quite a large moat around keeping our P&L healthy, being able to price our products for premium, being able to drive brand value which then translates into business value, and drive the business metrics, revenue, margin, and profitability because the brand is so strong.

Depends on the product category and the region. Snapdragon started in Asia. So this region of the world is where we've marketed and invested in it the longest. And it started in the smartphone. So Snapdragon was built on the back of the smartphone in Asia. But in other countries, Snapdragon will be built on the back of the PC. Because in those markets, we hadn't really invested like the US, which is where we're from. Ironically, we didn't invest in building Snapdragon until we entered the PC market.

It's always been the DNA. The brand was conceived again before my time, so I can't take credit for it. I think it's an amazing brand. But it was built as a global brand because it had elements of Asian culture. The name itself, the icon of the fireball, which we affectionately call the fireball, which sort of has a yin and a yang to it. The whole concept and the play on dragon, a lot of Asian influences there obviously where it started made sense. And then we sort of have brought the brand ethos more globally as we've gone around the world and introduced it to people. So it is truly a global brand. It's not a brand that meant a certain thing to a US audience that we're now trying to extract and make it relevant. And I think that's a good place to start.

It's super important right now. The focus on Gen Z and Gen Alpha is really important I think for most brands, but for technology brands because the adoption curve is a lot faster and easier. Young people are not as afraid of technology as older people are, right? It's just that fear factor. People get set in your ways as you get older. You don't want to change. Change is harder. But for young people, they're open to new things. And so it makes that conversation a lot easier to have. And then if you look around the world where we see huge growth opportunities in places like Indonesia, in Malaysia, in Vietnam, these are regions of the world and countries that have a population that is upwards of 80% under the age of 35. And so if we're really going to look at future growth, and not just in developed markets or historic markets, but in new markets, we have to focus on young people.

One of the key insights, it's funny that you asked the question because I once had to go speak to a law school. To a bunch of faculty, and the question they asked me to come speak about was how to teach Gen Z. Because they were lost. Because Gen Z doesn't want to learn the same way as Gen X and Gen Y millennials. And so there was a disconnect in how the professors were trained to teach and how students wanted to learn.

Because these are kids that were born with a tablet in their hand or a smartphone in their hand and so the way that they learn and get information and have access to information is so different, right? They're not cracking books. They're going to YouTube. This is also a very self-taught generation. They want to learn how to do something, they go to YouTube, watch a video, and figure it out, right? They're not opening a manual. Or going to the library. What's a manual? So they're visual learners and that's one key thing. So I did a lot of research on this generation, more on Gen Z and Gen Alpha, before my presentation. But it was really interesting to kind of see what they wanted and then how the teachers were teaching and there was a huge gap. And so that's sort of where I started to understand more and then realize the importance of this generation as far as how we talk technology and then drive the adoption curve. So we've done lots of research, in fact I think we've done research here in Indonesia on sort of Gen Z, Gen Alpha journey of product discoverability. And for example, discoverability, TikTok, right, a little bit more depth, Instagram, I want more information, YouTube. And it's sort of this social journey, this very visual, very video-based social journey. Hey, discover on TikTok, learn a little bit more on Instagram, and dive in on YouTube. Right? But in that journey there's no like go to a store and look up a spec tag and things like that. So understanding that's really important and also pretty interesting. And so how we market and how we do things. So when we talk about things like Mercedes and partnerships, how do we take that and how do we cross-section that with how this generation and the next one really wants to learn about you as a brand? Another thing that's really important to them is yes, they want the product to be great. Yes, they want value. Yes, they want capabilities and they don't want to buy things that don't work, but they also believe in brands at a higher rate and have more affinity towards brands that they also believe are doing good for the world. And so that became a really important part of the ethos of Snapdragon.

They are. They're about to explode.

I mean we're in a really exciting time. One of the reasons why is because we are probably facing the biggest technology inflection point since the smartphone. And that's AI. Or as some people may call it now since yesterday, super intelligence. But I believe, and I think we believe because we've been in this business for so long, the smartphone was the single most pivotal, critical piece of technology that has launched for humankind in the last 25 years. It really created the digital world. And when we drove the mission to put the internet in your pocket, since that time there's been a lot of innovation, there's been a lot of growth, there's been a lot of expansion. But really this AI inflection point is a catalyst towards the next big technology revolution.

The internet itself I think was a huge technology inflection point for sure. In a legacy product category which was your PC, but the PC didn't really change that much. It's just the access to something. It became a window to a world. And there wasn't much innovation driven into the PC after that. And so it didn't really change that model much, but it opened this world to information. So from that perspective, huge, huge, huge inflection point. But that was very, very limited to only a very small population if you look at the world's population. Today still, 37% of the world's population still is not connected. Imagine back then. So it wasn't for the masses, it wasn't for the many, it was for the few. The smartphone, after it launched, is really for the masses. And it really did take that idea of the internet and that access to information and put it in your pocket so you could walk around with it all day. And so I think that's much bigger than the internet itself. Maybe I'm a little biased.

I am. I mean, look, and I joke about super intelligence, but I think part of the bad PR of AI is the fact that the word artificial is in its title. And in a way it is super intelligence or it is a higher level of augmented intelligence. And that if used right can be very productive and very useful and very helpful for people. And that's the whole big debate going on right now. How do we actually manage this AI thing so that we can extract the goodness but not exploit the badness.

It's not giving control over to AI. So I'll give you an example. Obviously I'm in the business of AI because my company has been evolving and building technology for years. But I'm also an enterprise CMO who's having to deal with AI, right, in the creative process. And receiving the same pressures as any enterprise leader is about, well, you need to incorporate AI because you need to improve your productivity metrics. And so I'm grappling with the same things other CMOs, whether you're marketing cornflakes or whether you're marketing technology. But we've had this sort of way of adopting that has been very, very clear. And it's human-led, AI-powered. And it's really we have to stay in control. Humans are still in control. And humans have to be involved on the front end, in the middle and at the end. But you can use AI to help with that process. Productivity-wise, creativity-wise, ideation.

Hours. We use a great, I wouldn't call it a tool, it's really a platform called Writer. And my team saves hours on things, on menial tasks that used to take them a long time to do and now they do in seconds or minutes. Because they have this helper. They have this thing to help them. It's amazing what these tools can do to accelerate that process. And again, you need to editorialize. You need to bring your brain into the process from the very beginning all the way through to the end. But to have some acceleration, to have some kickstarting, to have something that can kind of eliminate some of the task management along the way is super helpful and it can unlock better critical thinking, more strategic planning, more work-life balance for people, right? And so those are all good things, but you don't just hand over your tasks or your entire process, your workflow to AI and then kick back and sip some wine. That's not what is happening.

I think again, there's a lot of comms work that could be done in the AI space. But I just think because we didn't know what we didn't know, there's a lot of assumptions made.