Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon on AI Agents and 6G at Semafor World Economy

Well, happy to be here. Good talking to you, Reed.

Yeah, it's a great topic of conversation. I think obviously we're very opinionated on this because I think what we have seen is every time you have a big change in wireless, you see a big shift in the players. You see a lot of shifts in what the control points are. And I think it's not going to be different when you think about the transition of phones to AI even to 6G. But I'd like to elaborate on that a little bit because it's a very interesting point of conversation. There are absolutely two things happening in the mobile ecosystem and those two things will lead to big changes and I'm going to break that down for you. One which is important is AI now has the ability to take a very important role in the man-machine interface because now we can communicate with computers the way we communicate with each other. It will read what we read. It will see what we see. We'll hear what we hear and you can interact with agents. And therefore you have a completely different way to interact with your devices. The second thing that is happening is the explosion and I think very comfortable saying 2026 is going to be the year of agents exactly like that. You go do apps are going to be agents that you tell the agent what you want and we'll create apps or do things for you. We're starting to see that. So how this is going to change the mobile ecosystem and let me start breaking that down. One thing is we are used now to and it's part of what we do every day. We have the smartphone as the center of our digital life. So the smartphone is at the very center. Everything else is around that smartphone, is around the OS and the app store and the experiences and you have all the apps in there and you go from one app to another app, you download the app you want. Exactly as you said and that's the center of your digital life. So much so that even things like wearables, they're being designed to extend the functionality of the smartphone. Think about a watch will get sensor data from you to the phone, will get notification back to you and allow you to see time, right? However, the center of the digital experience is changing to the agent. And that happens now when it changes to the agent. It's no longer the smartphone at the center. The agent's at the center. So the agents that you choose to use are going to be the ones that are going to be very relevant and that experience is going to happen across different devices. The phone is no longer at the very center, it's around the agent like those other class of devices.

Well, it means that it's a big change. I think if you look at if you buy a phone from Apple and you have the iOS and you have the app store, that's going to be a relevant question is which agent are you going to use? Is it going to be Apple agents, going to be different agents? And with that you're going to see changes. So you started to see right now two things happening in mobile: different class of devices like smart glasses and pendants and pens and jewelry, those new category of devices that go alongside your smartphone and you can start on one thing and end in another thing. But the other thing you're going to see is the evolution of agents like this whole episode of OpenClaw. Every phone company now is talking about their claw for the device, the ones they can install etc. And it's very interesting, last earnings call before OpenClaw, before this thing became popular, we talked about this phone that just got launched in China from ByteDance and you basically tell the phone what you want and the phone goes to your apps and starts doing things for you. And that's going to be a different way that you're going to use a phone. So I think very long answer to your question but the ecosystem is going to change and we'll see what the winners and the losers are.

So, I'm going to tie to this conversation we just had. 6G is going to be one of the biggest changes I think in the wireless industry because it's been designed for this new future of AI capable devices. So 6G, the first thing 6G is going to do, it will be the technology on the radio communication designed for see what I see. So all of us right with our future smart glasses going to be like walking cameras and for that I need the technology that's going to generate a very high speed. Think about 5G was a technology that enabled us to watch high-definition video streaming to you. Now, there's going to be a lot of data that you're going to stream to the cloud. We're going to be, you and I are going to have smart glasses and everything we see is going to get streamed to the cloud. We're all going to be walking cameras. The second part of 6G is actually the most exciting part of 6G. Most exciting part, not a lot of people understand it, but because of AI, every RF signal that they transmit between the base station to your phone and vice versa, all of that, you can treat that as physical AI. All of this RF environment, we're going to treat as physical AI. And now...

No, that means it's like sensor data. You're not training a model on language. You're training a model on the radio frequencies. And what you do with a physical AI now, you can develop completely new capabilities of this network. For example, it's going to be radar at scale. So one thing I think it's probably very timely having this conversation right now, one of the things you do with the network, you do drone detection, everything that is flying, the entire aerial economy, you're going to be able to do air traffic control at scale. You detect everything that moves. You go to every road, you see every bus, every car, every pedestrian, everything is going to be used for autonomous driving. You're going to be able to have sensing that you create a digital twin of the whole country. And that creates a whole new set of services. Not only context for those new mobile devices that are enabled by AI, but also you have now sensing capabilities coming from the telecom infrastructure which is going to enable a bunch of different things. And my last comment is this is the new data that is going to be important to train models. When we talk about winning the AI race, we talk about training models with the data that's available today on the internet. But think about the data when you and I are walking around and everything we see is now data, all of this thing that happens in the world is data, that's going to be the next frontier of training models. So exciting stuff happening in technology I'll say.