Hey everyone, I'm here at the Snapdragon Elite Festival. The world of Snapdragon is there, so let me quickly take you inside and show you what all is powered by Snapdragon. But more than that, I'm going to talk to someone really special at Snapdragon and show you what is coming in 2025 and what all they're powering.
We live in a world where technology is driving everything, quite literally, especially the automobiles we are driving today. Be it four-wheelers or two-wheelers, they are driven by technology, and going forward, it'll be a complete technology takeover. We'll have smart cars, cars that talk to us, and so much more happening. And for that, I have a very special guest, Nakul from Qualcomm. So thank you so much for joining, and lovely office. We'll be seeing a lot of people here soon, and I'm lucky to be in the office before anybody moved in.
Absolutely, very excited to have this office.
Well, exciting things are happening at your end, and especially in the automotive field. We've seen so many new things, and with AI, a lot of things are changing, especially in automobiles. If you could give us a glimpse of what is happening.
You know, the car for us has become a very interesting product because it's equated to a digital lifestyle product. The car has become a software product. I think one of the big changes that happened was as EVs became the norm, everybody wanted to have an EV. The complexity of the combustion engine powertrain wasn't something a lot of new players had to deal with, and you can see this in cars, you can see this in two-wheelers. But what that also did was it brought about this concept of how do you make this a software product? How do you actually bring an ecosystem that you have around you in the home, in the office, on your person? What is that look and feel like when you are inside the car? Now, the car is a very different type of product because it is a personal product, but not quite, because your family can also use it. You don't own it; there is a second life to a car. It has a wide variety of use cases from commercial to personal to fleets, etc. So the opportunity and the challenge for the auto industry is how do you build a product with software in mind with so many different use cases. For us, that was a fantastic opportunity because first of all, you had to redefine what the platform had to go to. It had to be relevant for 10-plus years, so you had to imagine what capabilities you might need to predict for, plan for. And you asked about AI. AI has been such an interesting intersection point because we do a lot of different products for the car. We've been doing driver assistance for a long time, automated driving, AI is central to all of that. But as you bring GenAI into the vehicle, and you've seen voice assistants have become so much more intelligent as LLMs have become relevant, it changes the experience completely. So for us, the car is kind of this epitome of how do you take a digital lifestyle product and introduce so many different facets that are not similar to the home or the enterprise or the office. It's a very different product. That's, I think, has been a tremendous learning for us, very, very enjoyable experience.
It's not just about that, right? Software experience, of course, but you are the ones who are powering it all with your chips. How does that go about? Because, you know, from building for smartphones to building for cars, as you mentioned, the longevity of that car is not just like a smartphone; you don't change it every two years. So how do you address that situation?
You know, so for us as a tech company, the first thing that we think about is how do we make our technology relevant to the end product as it might appear in the future, not necessarily appear in the present. And the one big leap that we had to make was to take advantage of the consumer ecosystem that we are part of. We do a lot of consumer IP, we do it every year, it requires us to move very fast, but then start to internalize what does it mean to live in the automotive space, which is not the consumer space. It is for a consumer, but the quality, the reliability, the safety, the life cycles, the complexity of the supply chain. And we invested, we were patient, we changed the way that we architected our platforms. We created something that allowed us to essentially meld the best of both worlds. And ultimately, the recipe that we reached was we want to be very relevant to the auto industry at a global footprint level. So we have to help redefine what the next-generation car looks like, what is that architecture that an automaker is going to be building on, and that's what we did. So we started the journey, you know, 10-plus years ago, but over the last five years, we really internalized what changes we had to make, and we've become the de facto platform in the industry in terms of everybody, you know, ecosystem partners, the Google and the Amazon, the Chinese, various different types of companies from HMI companies like Epic to, you know, CRM companies like Salesforce, the Tier 1 ecosystem, and then of course all of our OEM customers. Yeah, it's been a pretty rewarding last few years.
So when you mentioned about the future of technology and building for the future, I personally got a glimpse of two future products that I got to witness on a global level, and they're putting India on the global stage. And I'm proud that we're both powered by Indian brands, and even prouder that it's done by you guys. One was, of course, the drop that happened, which is Royal Enfield's first EV, and that's the Flying Flea. And the other one just recently, the Mahindra Unlimited India event, which was again, I got a glimpse of two of the most sophisticated technology marvels, I would say, in terms of automotive history. And these are giant leaps what we've seen by Indian manufacturers. The Flying Flea is, of course, what's going to set the path for future two-wheeler electric mobility, and of course, then we saw Mahindra's two electric cars. How is Snapdragon driving these?
