📅 Jan 26, 2026Six Five Media16 MIN26836 VIEWS20 SEGMENTS · 3 SPEAKERS
00:01:09 – Why Edge AI Matters at Global Scale
00:02:31 – Nikul’s Impressions of Davos
00:03:24 – The Evolution of Edge Technology
00:05:28 – Qualcomm’s Growth in Automotive and Industrial Sectors
00:06:17 – Recent Announcements and Innovations
00:10:23 – Qualcomm’s Competitive Edge in Robotics
00:13:29 – Looking Ahead to 2026: Strategy and Focus Areas
Edge AI, Physical Intelligence, and the Path to Scalable Automation
AI conversations at Davos often start in the data center. This one doesn’t stay there.
From Davos, Daniel Newman and Patrick Moorhead sit down with Nakul Duggal, EVP and Group...
2:31I mean, when you go from generation 4G to 5G and the service providers are deploying tons of infrastructure, they're thinking, you know, what are the killer apps that are going to drive ROI?
5:27Can you talk about the highlights for everybody?
The 65 is on the road with a view from Davos. Daniel, it's been a good show so far and it's pretty much everything you would expect from WEF. This intersection of policy, technology, primarily AI discussion, and we even had some tariff discussions as well.
Well, it became very interesting. It was set up in advance. There was definitely some escalation going on. You know, you're bringing leaders from all over the world here. But there's also this is just such a good platform. It's getting all these people here, putting them out in front to basically have the opportunity to share their vision. And of course, every year we're here, technology tends to reign front and center of this event. And once again, here we are, AI running front and center, most important topic in Davos. And even some of the stuff related to tariffs and related to policy, Pat really sits at the heart. It's about critical elements, minerals. It's about access to power and energy. All the things that are basically setting up the ability to lead the world's economy, which is going to be dictated by who wins in AI.
That's right. And most of the AI discussion so far has been focused on the data center. But quite frankly, that's an incomplete discussion as AI in the edge is arguably as important as the data center. And I can't imagine a better person to discuss this with than Nakul from Qualcomm. Nakul, welcome back to the 65.
Good to see you, too. I guess first question, this is your first Davos, and I was just curious to get your impressions. Did it end up being everything you expected?
It was expected to be an eventful Davos. So, certainly a one of a kind. No, I think it was a great show for me. My takeaway was if you kind of get past the data center focus on AI, the big takeaway was pretty much every business leader that you talk to, implementation of AI is on everybody's mind and folks are getting to the point where there is clearly value that is described with the technology but what is the recipe that allows you to be able to go scale this such that it actually starts to show productivity gains, starts to show what the world looks like as you deploy AI in your business. I think there is a lot of discussion around it. I did not walk away with a clear recipe that folks have come up with. So I feel actually that 2026 is going to be all about how do you implement this?
Well, I think a lot of these sort of philosophical debates that are going on in the market, Nakul, are related to all this investment that's being made. And by the way, you've seen the same thing at the, you know, we talk about both the edge and the cloud. I mean, when you go from generation 4G to 5G and the service providers are deploying tons of infrastructure, they're thinking, you know, what are the killer apps that are going to drive ROI? Well, right now we're seeing the same in the data center. You know, the first killer app that everybody's looking at is LLMs, but we're also seeing they're not necessarily profitable. So, we got to get enterprise AI. We're going to have to also build this connective tissue to the edge which to Pat's point the incomplete story is that there's multiple trillions of TAM out there that are going to depend on the edge and the data centers working together which and Qualcomm you guys are running down that path now anyways you're getting into data center too you're not just the edge but edge isn't a new thing right or like three decades it's been a topic Nakul I mean talk a little bit about
Look, I mean I'll take you back 10 years or so as you started to think about the modernization of legacy platforms as they started to intersect with advanced semiconductors. The car, if you think about a modern car today, central computer isn't something that we talk about, but if you go back 10 years ago, people were even thinking about why do I need the car to be connected to the internet.
So, I think when you think about inflection points, to me, what it really comes down to is what is the utility value of technology to a large business at scale and when the time spent between when you are massively investing to when you actually start to recover that investment. If that time is predictable, then you'll be able to get to those inflection points quickly. Today, if you think about how normal it's become to deploy robo taxi services as an example, it assumes that the car is running an edge AI model that is designed to be completely safe, can replace the driver, take the driver out of the loop. The car is fully connected. It's a robot on wheels and it's performing the function of transporting you. There is no dependency on the cloud when that function is happening. So as folks start to think about deployment of AI at the edge, one thing that I think folks don't realize is there's a training part to the process and then there is the execution part of the process especially for edge AI applications where you're actually performing a function that is real time, that is latency grade, that is safety grade and that's already at scale. Now if you apply this to what's the infrastructure that is needed across large industries, the last 10 years were mostly spent around connecting endpoints to the internet, but the idea was you're still processing in the cloud. You're not actually processing at the edge. We are talking to a bunch of different industrial leaders and it's all about OT change, operational transformation change, how do you get situational awareness, how do you make intelligent decisions because you know that the outcomes are all happening at the edge. That's where we're spending a lot of our time in terms of our internal transformation.
10 more exchanges in this transcript
Sign in free to read the rest of this interview. No card required.
Duggal, N. (2026, January 26). The View from Davos with Qualcomm’s Nakul Duggal [Interview transcript]. Six Five Media. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/727206/
MLA
Nakul Duggal. "The View from Davos with Qualcomm’s Nakul Duggal." Six Five Media, 26 Jan. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/727206/.
BibTeX
@misc{duggal2026_727206,
author = {Nakul Duggal},
title = {The View from Davos with Qualcomm’s Nakul Duggal},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, Six Five Media. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {jan},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/727206/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
