@qualcomm: The Connectivity and On-Device AI Breakthroughs Shaping What’s Next
📅 Jan 06, 2026CES10 MIN97 VIEWS33 SEGMENTS · 2 SPEAKERS
Don McGuire, CMO of @qualcomm Incorporated, unpacks the innovations pushing mobile, automotive, and spatial computing into a new era. He explains what Qualcomm is learning from AI assistants and voice interfaces, where humans stay essential as creative AI scales, and how brands can engage Gen Z and Gen Alpha in more immersive ways. McGuire also looks ahead to the trends leaders should be paying attention to now.
2:10Did that take a long time to get to that point?
3:16What are some of the things that you're learning from how consumers and customers interact with those?
5:21So it's just a more humanizing way of doing it, right?
5:37What's going on there and with social commerce and the work that you're doing?
7:07Is it fair to say that the experience of shopping and the experience of consuming media and being a consumer of advertising, all that's kind of blurring and blending together, right?
7:24How about AI for creative purposes, generative AI?
8:29Where do you think about that and how is your technology coming into play there?
Welcome back to the CA Space Studio here at CES 2026. I'm your host, James Coteki, and we're here with Qualcomm's CMO, Don Magcguire. Thanks for joining us here today.
So, I love to have people define their brands and what it means to you. So, what is Qualcomm? What is your definition? Well from a brand perspective, obviously it's also a corporate identity. The name of the company. 40th birthday this or last year just turned 40. From a master brand perspective, it's really sort of the umbrella brand of where everything fits underneath. We have two large product brands. Snapdragon being our more consumer-facing brand and there's several product categories that fit under the Snapdragon portfolio and then Dragon Wing which is more of our sort of B2B product lines that covers things like robotics and connectivity and things like that. We I would say we're kind of a mini house of brands.
And each have a unique identity and storytelling, but they all sort of ladder up to our overarching promise, which is to deliver intelligent computing everywhere.
Yeah, and that's how we kind of ladder things up. We're in a lot of different product categories. Our technology is so pervasive. It can be overwhelming and complex if you don't sort of organize it under like a messaging architecture and how you bring it to life and make it understandable for people, especially different audiences. So we tend to look at our hierarchy of what does Qualcomm stand for? Why do we exist? Why do we matter? And that's sort of to deliver intelligent computing everywhere. The intelligence is a nod to AI which we've been in for 14 years. Computing is our processing power, our compute power at high performance, low power, which we're known for. And then the everywhere is a nod to our history and connectivity.
Because this is a CPACE studio, we can get into the weeds a little bit on this messaging piece. And I'm actually curious how long. So what you said was very elegant and very eloquent and very compact. Did that take a long time to get to that point? Like, these can be, you're not rebranding but even like messaging processes can be really intense, especially when you have so many different complex technologies, and by the way those aren't standing still, those are continuing to evolve. So tell me how you thought about even putting that together.
Creating simple is really hard. It really is. You think it wouldn't be, but it is because you have the distillation of very complex technology into an articulation that can fit. We have a process called 3-30-300. So a 3-second post, social post, a 30-second elevator conversation, a 3-minute introductory and a 30-minute presentation. So we have to create messaging that can be distilled down to that 3-second level all the way to a PowerPoint deck.
Well, thanks for this 10-minute conversation. This is somewhere in the nether zone here, but we're going to figure out I think some interesting insights from this. One of the things we wanted to dive into with you was AI chatbots and voice agents. What are some of the things that you're learning from how consumers and customers interact with those?
What we're really excited about and what we're learning across a couple vectors. First is discoverability. And we're just at the beginning of this, right? So the agentic AI sort of call it a trend now, but it will be pervasive and it will be the way we interact with computers in the future. It will be, you know, three years ago I think we came up with the term AI is the new UI and so how you interact with your computers or your computing spaces through agentic experiences is going to be the way we interact with our digital worlds. So what we're learning through what is available today is that what's coming tomorrow is going to be more suggestive, more anticipatory, and actually be more helpful than prompt and response.
Mcguire, D. (2026, January 6). @qualcomm: The Connectivity and On-Device AI Breakthroughs Shaping What’s Next [Interview transcript]. CES. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/626978/
MLA
Don Mcguire. "@qualcomm: The Connectivity and On-Device AI Breakthroughs Shaping What’s Next." CES, 6 Jan. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/626978/.
BibTeX
@misc{mcguire2026_626978,
author = {Don Mcguire},
title = {@qualcomm: The Connectivity and On-Device AI Breakthroughs Shaping What’s Next},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, CES. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {jan},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/626978/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
