AI Agents Are Coming | Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon

Very happy to be here. Looking forward to this conversation, Arjun.

Look, it's a great topic of conversation, especially because we are now getting to the point on this AI transition journey that we have clarity on what those devices are going to be and what you're going to do. But I'm going to answer your question by saying you're still going to have your phone. Your phone's not going to go anywhere, but your phone's going to get much better. Your phone is going to have agents that are going to operate the phone for you. But then there's going to be new classes of devices that we're going to wear. And I will answer your question. I want to say, what do those things really mean? And we've been talking about something called personal AI devices. As large language models and large visual models understand the world the way we understand them, understand how we communicate, it is very logical that we're going to interact with those devices close to our senses, closer to our eyes, close to our mouth, to our ears. And then there's going to be things that we're going to wear. Glasses is very natural, but there's going to be jewelry, there's going to be pendants, there's going to be pins, because the type of interface is kind of very different than what used to be in your PC and your smartphone. And that's going to be a new class of devices. They're going to be part of our mobile experience.

Okay, it's a number of technologies, and I'm going to break it down for you. I think the first one is those large language models got pretty good, and they also got very specialized. Not only language models, but also visual models. You started to hear about words like multimodal, that you'll have models that take different inputs, audio, language, vision. You start hearing about smaller models, mixture of experts models, very specific for certain functions. You started to hear about distillation of models, where a big model gets trained and then you get a smaller model. And you started to hear about those models being connected to different applications. You hear about technologies such as MCP protocols, that a model can go to the internet and connect to other apps, to other cloud services. And then the last part of this basket of technologies is, I'm sure you heard about open-claw, those techniques called orchestrators, that agents that go operate your computer, your device for you, are going to look at your data, look at the models, and get things done for you. When you put all of this together, you created the condition for us to start changing our mobile experience, and you start to interact with mobile devices in the way we're going to interact with agents. Very different. There's no keyboard. You don't need to touch. You just need to see and talk. And I think that starts to create the precondition for us to see this mobile revolution that is happening because of AI.

Look, it's really important, and those models will continue to be developed. But I think we're getting to the point in the industry now that we're starting to reach maturity in understanding how those models and computers are going to work together. I'm going to be a little bit provocative, because I remember there was a lot of discussions about, maybe a year or two ago, there was a lot of debate about, is this model going to run on the cloud or on the edge? Can I run this exact model that is running on the cloud on the devices at the edge? But I think that was the wrong discussion. Think about, for example, Arjun, if I ask you how many apps do you have on your phone, you're probably going to tell me probably over 200 apps organized in folders. And if I ask you, let's go one by one and see which app runs on what portion of the app on the cloud and what portion on the device, it's probably a useless exercise. And I know they're all doing both, because if you put your phone in airplane mode, it becomes not very useful. So I think the same thing is happening with AI. AI is just a new form of doing computing, and models are now developing in a way that there are models specific that are going to be running on the edge, and models specific that are going to be running on the cloud, and they're going to work together as one. And there's actually an industry term now called compute continuum. It's going to be like one integrated system. And I'll give you an example. What do I mean? If I am going to interact with my future personal AI device, let's say smart glasses, and I'm going to interact the way I'm interacting with you right now, I need to have an instant response. I may be walking on the street and I say, "Who's this person?" And the model is going to say, "That's Arjun from CNBC. You know him. You probably want to say hi." I cannot wait. I cannot just ask the question, keep walking, and wait for the tokens to come in. The same thing if I read a menu and I say, "What does this say?" You want an instant response. If I look up a QR code, "Please pay this for me." So what is happening is the compute is naturally breaking down into what's going to happen on the edge and what's going to happen on the cloud. They're going to be integrated. One is not going to function without the other. And I think that's going to define how we think about the future of consumer electronics and devices in the age of AI. And I just want to tell you, it's no different than what happened to cars, what happened to robots. Actually, those are great examples of edge AI. They run in the robot and they run in the car.

Okay, that's actually one of the questions I love answering because, you know, even though we have been changing Qualcomm and we're becoming a much more diversified company, we're still one of the biggest providers of mobile technology. And it's fascinating now to see what's happened with those agents and what's happened with the mobile phone. When we talk about agents, I'm kind of convinced 2026 is going to be the year of agents. We're starting to see this now getting scale, and those things became really popular and went viral on the internet when open-claw was launched. And you have now this thing that you install on your computer, and you ask the agent to do things for you. You create agents, and it goes to your data, does things on your behalf, operates your machine for you, goes to the internet. And then what you saw happen, I remember people were going in and buying computers. A lot of people were buying Mac Minis, they were sold out, and they put them into their office, and they installed open-claw and let the thing running, consuming tokens like crazy, going to their Anthropic accounts and the OpenAI accounts to submit all the tokens. Now what that did was show a path of how we're going to interact with our computers. We are going to use our computers, but the agents are going to use our computers on our behalf and do things for you. Now in a mobile environment, there's no way you're going to get a backpack, put a car battery, put a Mac Mini, and carry that alongside your phone. So those things are going to happen in the phone. And I think that's also going to define how the phone experience, given that billions of people have phones, will evolve. So now we have clarity on what an AI phone and an AI PC is, and I'm going to break that down for you. What's going to happen? Your phone is going to have dual personas. Your phone will continue to be your phone. The phone's not going to go anywhere. You're going to get your phone, pull it out of your pocket, go to your apps, and do those things. But the phone also is going to have those orchestrators, those claws. You're going to see between now and summer, every OS vendor talking about their OS having an orchestrator and a claw. And you'll be able to also get agents to do things for you. And it's going to operate your phone on your behalf. It's going to go to your apps. You're going to give them instructions. This change is so profound that even if I go a moment outside the phone, I'll tell you what happened with software companies. The whole SaaS industry now, software companies develop their software for a human to utilize, with a human interface, but also for an agent to utilize, to go into their software and do things. And the way this is going to play out is fascinating. For example, you're going to have the things that you do yourself, but it's going to be the agent doing things for you. I saw some examples where somebody has a meeting, and then another invitation comes up, and it will say, "Cristiano, you have this podcast with Arjun from CNBC. Would this take priority after this other meeting?" I'm going to say, "Of course it takes priority." Then it says, "Okay, can I reschedule this other meeting for you?" And you say, "Yes." And the agent will call the person if it needs to talk to a person, send an email, figure out how to reschedule things for you based on your calendar. And slowly we're going to get used to these new experiences, and over time your phones are going to be doing both. It's going to be operated by the agent and it's going to be operated by you.

It's interesting. If you remember the transition from a feature phone to a smartphone, which was a huge transition, the phone became a computer. What happened in the early days of the smartphone? The very early days, the apps that you had were the apps that came from the OEM. I'm sure when you buy your iPhone, it comes with iTunes, it comes with that app that you can move drums and instruments and play around. But eventually, what happened is the app store became available, and developers started to write all sorts of different apps. And I can tell you right now, the absolute majority of the experience that you have on your phone today didn't come from the OS itself, didn't come from the OEM, but actually came from developers. It is a platform. The smartphone is the largest platform ever created by mankind. Now let's do a parallel with AI. AI happened. First application that we saw was chatbots. People go in, they ask a question, they get an answer. Then they started to do more advanced things like "summarize this for me." And then a lot of the OEMs said, "How can I apply AI to my camera? How can I apply AI to this different functionality?" And kind of mix usability. Some things were very useful, some things were kind of early days. But then something happened: those orchestrators and those agents happened, and then everything started to change, because now AI can become very useful, and it can do things for you. I think we are at that inflection point, and that's why I said '26 is the year that those things start to be clear and start to get scale with those agents. So much so that you're going to see between now and summer every OS vendor talking about how they're going to have those orchestrators built into the OS, because those orchestrators become the new app store. And we're going to see the coexistence of the old and the new in the same device, because in the case of a phone, you only carry one device, you don't carry two. And then we're going to see some other classes of devices which are just agents, no legacy, like smart glasses, personal AI devices, and pins. And I think that's the reason I like to draw this parallel, because it went from how an OEM or an OS will add first-party AI capabilities to an endless set of possibilities as people create their own agents and agents start to operate devices on your behalf.

They're not dead, but apps are going to change. Absolutely. Apps are going to change. I'm going to go back to something I said two years ago. All of us have a banking app. You have your bank of choice and you have the app. So you have a developer. Imagine how the app is going to be that most of the bank users are going to like it. What are the colors? It's going to fit into a screen of your device. It's going to have a manual, and you're going to start the app. It's going to say, "This is my checking account. This is how much money I have in the bank. These are my last transactions. This is my credit card. This is my investments." And the way it's going to be done is going to be the way that most people are going to like it. Now, that app in your phone, your banking app, has your credentials. So it can go to the bank, authenticate itself as a proxy of you, and get that information to you. Now you can have an agent that you give the credentials to your bank, and the way the app is going to be the same app experience. I'm going to describe it to you. You're going to say, "How much do I have in my checking account?" And it's going to say, "This is how much you have. These are your last three transactions. Can you please plot a graph for me about this?" And then if you said, "I want this information to be displayed to me on my screen, but I don't like the colors of the app. I want it to be different colors," it will render for you. So this is the fundamental difference. This is how apps are going to evolve into agents. They're going to become way more powerful, way more bespoke, and they're going to be integrated into everything. You can be in a restaurant and you're going to look at a QR code with the bill. I'm going to say, "Pay this for me. Please take it off my checking account. Notify me when I'm done." That's going to be different than you opening the app and going through the process yourself.

Yes and no. So let me step back a little bit and talk about how our digital life, especially from a consumer standpoint, is going to work. We are coming today, in the present time, into a world where the absolute center of our digital life is our smartphone. Our most inseparable device. Everything is around the smartphone. The smartphone is like the sun, every planet is around the smartphone. So much so that if you look at what was defined as a smart wearable, those smart wearables' job was to extend the functionality of the phone to you. Let's go to a simple thing like a smart watch. It will give you the time, send sensor data from you to the phone, and get notifications from the phone back to you. And it's so integrated that you see how the industry actually works. The same phone company is the one that's doing a lot of the wearables and its ecosystem. There's a big change now in the future, and it's a very near future, especially as agents start to get scale. The center of your digital experience is the agent that you choose, or the multiple agents that you choose, and now everything is around the agent. The phone is around the agent. The new classes of devices, I know we're going to talk about that in a second, are going to be around the agent as well. And the agent will be the one that will understand human intentions and will do things for you. So there is a shift in what the center of gravity is for your digital life. And that's going to change the relationship with our devices. And with that, I'm going to answer your question. Will the phone disappear? Absolutely not. The phone is an incredibly useful device. The scale of the smartphone is tremendous. But we're going to use our phones a little bit differently. Remember when the smartphone arrived, some people said the laptop is dead. Absolutely not. The laptop was never dead. The laptop is still here and is still strong. But the way you used to work on your laptop changed, workloads shifted. I like to provide this example because it's easy for most of us to understand. We started doing e-commerce on a laptop. We started doing social media on a laptop. That's where you go to your Facebook account. Now, most e-commerce and social media is done on a mobile device. So your phone is still going to be there, but certain workloads are going to shift to new classes of devices because it's going to be better for the agent to interact with you, and there's a new class of devices going to be better for you as well. So in summary, your phone is still going to be there. Your phone is going to change. It's going to have a lot more computing because you're going to do your phone things, but you're going to run agents that are going to operate the phone for you. And then the experience you have on the phone, some of those experiences are going to migrate to new devices that are easier to interact with you in human language and human vision.