AI Takeover: Qualcomm’s Big Bet on AI Agents, Robots and 6G | Titans and Disruptors

0:00Every car, every bus, every bicycle, every pedestrian, everything is moving. You're going to create a digital twin of the entire world. Welcome to the edge of possible. You may not have heard of Qualcomm, but you have definitely used their products. Many major smart device manufacturers use Qualcomm's technology, ranging from physical chips in our phones to the 4G, 5G, and soon 6G networks that connect them. But in the lightning-fast tech industry, what's cutting-edge today can become obsolete tomorrow. Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon is prepared to bet the farm to stay ahead. If you look at our companies in the mobile industry, to every generation of wireless, there was a big cemetery of companies, and we're still here.

0:43Cristiano credits the 40-year-old company's success in part to its culture of reinvention. In Cristiano's five years as CEO, the company has evolved from one that's highly smartphone-dependent to one that's working in automotive, robotics, and wearable AI. Jewelry, pins, pendants, things that you wear, and it can connect you to an agent. I met with Cristiano at Qualcomm's high-tech headquarters in San Diego. Robot incoming. He's giving us a big warning. To discuss how Cristiano and Qualcomm are building what could be our next primary device after the smartphone. I'm Allison Chantel, and this is Fortune 500, Titans and Disruptors of Industry.

1:20We'll be back with Cristiano after a message from our sponsor.

1:32Fortune spoke with Deloitte U.S. CEO Jason Garzadas on understanding quantum computing and how he sees it transforming industries. Quantum computing has been a topic for some time in research circles, certainly closely watched by business. But it's fundamentally a different computing paradigm that uses the principles of physics instead of mathematics to drive the computing outcomes. And I think the real uses will be ultimately around very complex optimization scenarios, further enhancements to scaling machine learning, and also very complicated simulations that could be relevant to a whole host of different business applications.

2:18What steps should leaders take to prepare their organizations for quantum computing? It's really about readiness planning right now and preparing an organization to understand the implications, understanding what skill sets would be required, what type of cybersecurity protocols would need to be in place to make it viable in an enterprise context, and begin to think about the types of use cases that would be very germane around optimization and simulation. Cristiano, thank you so much for sitting with us for the Fortune 500 Titans and Disruptors podcast. You are sitting in the center of the universe of AI.

2:59I'm not sure that people realize quite how much Qualcomm is embedded in pretty much everything that they use from a device standpoint. Can you maybe just give us some size and scale to it? You're 117 on the Fortune 500. About 5 billion devices are powered by Qualcomm chips. And counting. And counting. So kind of give us some scale to what you're doing here. Yeah, by the way, thank you for taking the time. Very happy to be here talking to you. Look, Qualcomm's a very unique company. We used to say, before people got to hear about Snapdragon, we used to say Qualcomm's probably the biggest company.

3:30Nobody knows about it. I think when we started, it was about creating the fundamental technology that everybody uses now. I think for wireless, we have been into every generation of wireless. But as you look at what happened with the wireless revolution, and I think you look at our smartphone right now as most inseparable device, our technology basically propelled by the scale of the mobile industry starts to go in many different places. And I think today, I think Qualcomm not only is in the smartphones, I think we enter into the PC space. We are into the wearable space, those future personal AI devices.

4:04We're going very large scale business on automotive. It's in people's cars and it's going to industry and industrial and all the way to what is going to be the future robotics and data center. And I think we're very happy. You know, we have a very large scale semiconductor business. I think most of us grew up in the company within mobile, but we started to see their technology became relevant to so many other industries. And I think that's what we're doing right now. Yeah, I think of you all as sort of like the brains of the tech that we use every day, and increasingly so, whether it's the cars we drive or the phones that we use, the computers we're on, you all are there embedded in the devices.

4:45We just had a new issue of Fortune come out, and our cover is the AI tipping point. It feels like we're very much in a new wave of AI where maybe it hasn't really hit peak consumer yet, and people are still kind of wondering on the whole, what is this and how do I use it and what does it mean? but certainly from the standpoint of the capabilities of AI, it feels like we're at this just straight vertical lineup. Would you agree with that? And what's happened? Maybe you could give us like some big picture of what has happened the last few months that has made it so. 100%. I think we have been preparing for this point and we look at this a little bit different than some of the other companies.

5:19You know, we build a lot of devices that people, you know, use every day and devices how people are going to interact with AI and there are aspects of AI that are going to change, you know, how we actually think about computing in general. I think the way we look into this is everything we do, it's going to be processing some form of AI or connecting to the cloud to, you know, to do a lot of AI. This is how we're going to go to this transition of computing that we don't worry about OSs, we don't worry about applications. And I think what is causing this tipping point is that in this year, 2026, we've been saying that.

5:57That's going to be the year of agents. It's now you have agents that can, you know, make AI useful to do many, many different things. And I'm going to break this down into different aspects when you think about the evolution of AI. I think we all started, heard about ChatTBT. There's a chat box. You go and ask a question. But then you also have this incredible development about how AI just become the next higher level language that you can use to write code. But then there are other aspects. One aspect is, and we've been saying that I think since the very beginning, which is now because of large language models, because of large visual models, the AI understand the world the way we understand the world, communicate with us the way we communicate with natural language, and that creates a new user interface between the humans and the computers.

6:48And now once you have all of those things put together in an agent that you can tell the agent what you want, that's going to fundamentally change how we interact with those devices. And with that, I think I started to get a lot of scale. I think people are just starting to understand that they're agents for everything now. They're agents that are going to go into the computer, do things for you, is going to go to the cloud and do things for you. And I think that is how we're going to start to see massive amount of scale into everyday things that we do on the consumer space, on the enterprise space.

7:21And we're excited about that because it's going to create a big cycle of new devices. They're going to be intelligent. They're going to be smart. And they're going to be connecting us with those agents. AI-powered devices often demand lightning-fast networks to operate fully, something that Qualcomm and Amon have spent decades building. Qualcomm technology powered the launch of the 3G, 4G, and 5G cellular networks. Aman, who first joined Qualcomm as an engineer in 1995, directed Qualcomm's global 5G rollout. Today, Aman is eyeing 6G, which he believes will deliver the efficiency and performance required by applications like holograms, collaborative robots, and driverless cars.

8:03I was really struck by your MWC, your World Mobile Congress conversation about how we've gotten from 2G to now 6G and the ecosystem of you. I was wondering if you could kind of walk us through that. You've been at Qualcomm a long time, 30 years. You're actually a boomerang CEO. You were here, you left, you came back, you've risen through the ranks. But walk me through that transition in tech and what 6G means for people like you and me. Every even number generation of wireless is huge. So 2G was huge, 4G was huge, then 6G just being an even number is going to be huge. But I think beyond that, I think 6G is one of the probably biggest transitions we're going to see in wireless.

8:44And it's going to be way beyond, I think, how we think about wireless, just connectivity. But it's going to be also how AI is going to be part of the networks. And it's going to feel a little bit different for the entire sector. You know, one of the things I said in MWC, and I wanted to be provocative on purpose. You know, if you remember how telecom started, right, you have a dial tone and you call somebody, right? And all of a sudden, you look at telecom today, it's very, very different. You have a very high-capacity data network where you stream television, you do data, you do computation on demand, you do a bunch of different services way beyond calling somebody.

9:30I think that type of transition is going to be also what's going to happen when you go to 6G. So we talk about agents a lot. One of the things that we are seeing now with those agents and this new kind of classes of AI devices is we are going to see devices, we call them personal AI devices. Glasses, for example, it's very natural because if the AI understands what we say, what we hear, what we see, glasses is very close to our senses, like close to your eyes, your ears, your mouth, you turn your head, you see things. And all of this information, it's going to be very important context for agents to do things for you.

10:12So one of the features of 6G, of course, is I need to have a network that everything that I see can get streamed to the cloud at a very high performance and high speed. So all of us are going to be walking cameras, right? And this concept of see what I see is what 6G is going to do. So one of the features of 6G that consumers relate to, what is this radio going to do for me? It's going to be a very fast uplink. If you think about what happened with 5G, 5G enabled streaming a high-definition video to your phone, to your laptop. Now you're going to stream information up to the cloud, which is going to be very important context for agents and for models.

10:55That's the connectivity side. But the big picture of 6G is because RF signals can be looked at as physical AI. And what's an RF signal? It's like a radio signal, radio frequency that go from the tower, the base station to your phone. So that's how you transmit data over the air. All of those signals, which are electric magnetic waves, we're going to look at those things as physical AI. It's just sensor data, and you can apply AI to the network to make sense of all of these things. So if I give you an example, when I look at my automotive business, and we have assisted driving and autonomous systems, and we have input from a bunch of sensors, there's cameras on the car, but it also has radars, like a radar.

11:43You know, send a signal, I'll get a reflection back, and then he maps everything around you. sometimes when you look at some demonstration of some advanced driving system, you see the screen, all of the different cars that the radar can detect. So think about every single one of us connecting to the 6G network, the radio that we transmit and we receive. When the AI process all this data, this is like a radar at scale. So another thing that 6G is going to do, not only at your neighborhood, not only at the city, at the state, but at the entire country level, will map the digital twin, I think, of the world.

12:22And that also become very interesting. Of course, in today's, I think, environment, if I say that, everybody will understand it. Like you can do drone detection. You know, everything that is moving is going to be tracked. You have a radar at scale. You can manage the entire future aerial economy. The things that we also look at maps, and you'll see is there congestion here? Is it green? Is it yellow? Is it red? With 6G, you'll be able to map every car, every bus, every bicycle, every pedestrian, everything just moving. What are the roads? Everything around you. You'll be able to use AI to refine and detect different and objects, you're going to create a digital twin of the entire world.

13:04And that's going to be very, very important data for agents as we continue to evolve how we think about computing. So 6G is a big transformation. You probably saw I'm very excited about it, I think. And it's also for a company like Qualcomm. It's perfect for everything we have been doing, how we diversify. We can come up with an end-to-end story from the device to the network and to the data center. There is so much to unpack there, and I want to get to a lot of it. So for like just the average Joe out there, it's more data, more personalized data than ever before will be collected and will be usable to create a personal relationship with our devices.

13:40But, you know, there's so many applications for that that we can get to a really granular level of understanding everything out there. But I want to talk about that relationship that we're going to have to our devices and then also what the future format could look like for what our devices will be. It sounds like we're moving from a relationship with our tech that it's responsive to what we want, to anticipating what we want and sensing in the world because of all this extra data. Is that correct? Yeah, that's a good way to put it. And I think one of the things you said, as you summarize it, there's an important point.

14:11When you think about what our relationship with devices is an example. Like, so, for example, I think the first personal device we all got to experience in computing was the PC, like the first device. And we started doing a lot of things on the PC. but then the phone arrived and what happened is people didn't abandon the pc you still have it you still use it it's incredibly useful but certain workloads did shift from the pc to your phone given because you know now you have the computer with you all the time as an example when e-commerce started people started to do a lot of all the e-commerce on on your pc most of the world right now will do e-commerce on a mobile phone.

14:54But now, fast forward to what we're starting to see right now. You see all those different companies building what we call personal AI devices. You saw a lot of the AI companies. There are some secret form factors that I cannot tell you about it, but I think we're working with pretty much all of them. It's like open AI, meta. All of them. And you have different things that people wear. Glasses is the easiest one to understand, but they're going to be more. They're going to be jewelry, pins, pendants, things that you wear, and it can connect you to an agent. And now have this conversation. If the AI understands what we write, can read everything we read, see everything we see, the type of use cases are going to be a lot more personal, needs to have a lot more context, and needs to happen a little different.

15:45because if it not, you just pull up your phone and you do it today. So how do I describe that, I think, for you? Like, for example, you'll be walking around and you have a glass and you're going to see, I really like this. I'd like to buy this. How much is it on Amazon? And it's going to say, oh, this is how much it is on Amazon. And they're going to say, can you render how I'm going to look with this? And it's going to get rendered. So it's going to be a different kind of low-friction experience and workloads are going to start to shift. In the same way, the shift from your proceed to phone, certain things you're going to do with an agent.

16:20We even have this example that we often say, which is shows the importance of context. You're going to be walking around and the agent is going to say, I just noticed you have 10 minutes right now. Can you talk to me? I have a conflict on your calendar. I would like to ask you for options. Like, it's very interesting how also those things are going to interact across devices, which is, you know, a meeting pop up and the agent said, you have a conflict with a doctor appointment. Do you want me to call the doctor for you and reschedule? And then, you know, we actually call and it said, I'm calling on behalf of this person.

16:54You know, I would like to change the appointment. What's your availability next week? So those are going to be different type of use cases. and as they started to get developed with low friction, we're going to see they'll start interacting with them with other types of devices. And the way to think about this, this is the way we've been talking about the ecosystem of you as an example. There's a big shift in the industry. We are coming from, and we're very proud of it because we had a big piece of that in a world that is a smartphone centric. The smartphone is the center of your digital world.

17:31And then what happens is everything is around that smartphone. That's like you pick your smartphone and you're going to do everything with it. If you have a wearable device, the job of the wearable device is just to extend the functionality of your phone. Like people sometimes buy the wearable from the same brand of the phone because it's kind of extended. Right, like Apple has the watch and the phone. You send sensor data. That's best. Now the center, when you use UI in an agent, the center of your digital life is no longer the phone. It's the agent. And the agent will manifest itself on your phone and your PC and across different devices.

18:07You're going to see a lot of discussions about experience across devices. And when you have this shift, the agent needs to understand context to be proactive. You have models that have been trained today on all of this data that we created to put it on the Internet. So you go in, you look at the books and social posts and you train models. Think about tomorrow. If all of us walking around over cameras to see what we see, that amount of data is massive. It will dwarf the data that's been training models today. And that's how AI is going to evolve and it's going to be very personalized to you. Qualcomm technology has been embedded in smartphones since the earliest models.

18:48The company locked down early deals with industry leaders like Apple and LG in the early 2000s, and smartphones today are still about 75 % of Qualcomm's high-margin chip sales. But rapid advancements in AI are now expanding the mobile technology landscape beyond the smartphone. Rather than moving away from the phone, Aman is leaning in, developing new tools and systems that connect and enhance the devices people already use. You sit in a position where you see what Microsoft is building, what OpenAI is building, what Meta is building. We've talked some about the glasses, but what future form do you think really will be the one that wins?

19:24Look, you're going to have many, right? And the interesting thing about those agents is they have to be with you all the time. So that's why we saw the whole concept of wearable is turning into a personal AI device. And it's going to be things that you are comfortable wearing. You have the mix now of fashion and technology, and you have AI that people wear. And available for me to buy in stores like 2027, 2028. I think so. You're going to start to see some of those towards the end of this year. Amazing. Yes. Awesome. So smartphones have been the primary device. How much longer do you think smartphones will be the primary device for?

20:02I think it's already in the process of a change. I think what is going to happen if I have to make a prediction, and it's super hard to make those predictions. So I'll say, I'll give a 50 % chance that I'll be correct. But I'll say, this year will be the year of agents. And you started to see more and more form factors of things that people wear. When you start to get to 27, 28, you're going to start to see workload shift. The smartphone's not going to go anywhere. But here's how I describe this. If you pull up your phone, you have to pull up your phone, open your phone, unlock your phone. and you're going to do phone things, right?

20:38However, the phone is not natural for you to be pointing at things or picking up your phone and you talk to your phone. So as you have those other devices, certain things, not everything, but certain things is going to be more intuitive to you to just do it. For example, let's say you wear a smart glass that has a camera and you get a restaurant bill and you look at the bill and it has a QR code and say, pay this, and just notify me what's completed. and that's it. It's done. So I think what we're going to see within 27, 28, I think there's going to be a lot of workloads are going to shift to those devices.

21:13And will those devices be on market by then, you think? We see the smart glasses already. The devices are starting to get on market. I think 27, 28, they get scale. Like one of the things we talk about it is those devices right now are now in the tens of millions. I think within the next five years, it's very possible they're going to go to hundreds of millions and going to get to billion. And it's all about the maturity of agents and maturity of agents doing things for you. And then it's going to become very, very natural. And I believe that's how we're going to see all of us going to have different devices.

21:47And it creates another interesting dynamic. But do you think there'll be a primary device for agents? Like, will there be like the pendant or the glasses? It sounds like you're pretty bullish on glasses. I am bullish on glasses. I'm very bullish on glasses. And the reason is because, Because, look, I wear glasses, but I think humans are very comfortable with glasses, and glasses is very natural. You turn your head, that's where the camera is going to see what your eyes are going to be seeing. It's very close to your ear, it's very close to your mouth. You're going to read something, the camera can read it.

22:19So glasses, I think, is the primary form factor. But let me tell you something important about this. When you buy a PC, it's a consumer electronic device, you buy a phone, it's a consumer electronic device, you have consumer electronic brands. But when you think about things that you wear, because it's close to you, close to your senses, and agents seems to be like very low friction intuitive, that's our fashion devices. So now you have the mix of fashion and technology. It's very interesting. For example, if you look at some of the glasses company, they can become a technology company. Their multiple is going to expand, but you're still going to be buying a fashion device.

22:55Would you believe that a consumer electronic company will do one glass in six colors and everybody's going to wear that or people are going to pick the brand that they want? And I think what's going to happen is you're going to see more things that we wear becoming smart and it's going to be a new set of players. One thing I can tell you with precision, every new generation of wireless, Just think about mobile as an example. The players change. The industry change. So I think we're going to see that again. So you'll think there'll be like an Apple or Google of the future AI device. I think in personal AI devices, more horizontal, and it's going to be less concentration.

23:39It's going to be a lot more fragmentation because not everybody wear the same clothes. Not everybody wear the same glasses. So I think you're going to have a number of different companies. and the key thing is going to be the control point. They used to be the OSs and the App Store become the agents that you use. And it's not going to be like one agent that rule it. Oh, it's going to be different agents. There are going to be different agents that you're going to choose to use. And I think the interesting thing is you started to see things like with OpenClaw and a bunch of things getting installed.

24:11OpenClaw, for anyone who doesn't know, it was a big agentic AI moment that really took over the Internet. It was released and it could do just incredible things, although there's a lot of cybersecurity issues that came with it. Like, people's, like, digital wallets were coming online and things. The reason I brought this example is because it's just not unique to just those personal AI devices. Even your phone's gonna change. As an example, in the last earnings call, we talked about this, nobody paid attention to, but we said that ByDance in China, you know, launched a smartphone. and the smartphone has had an agent like like open claw and basically is the same thing you talk to the phone or you text your phone and you say do this for me and you go to your phones and go to your apps and started to start one app close another app and start doing things for you so i think we're going to see the control point of the industry is changing it's not about the os and the app store it's going to be what are the agents or the claw that you're going to select it's going be multiple event, is going to do things for you on your existing devices.

25:17And then there are going to be new classes of devices that you're going to use with your agent of choice that's just going to be doing things for you as you go about your day. And I think that's how this thing is going to pan out and how AI is going to get scale. Maybe that's why I go back to how we started. That's the tipping point. As AI becomes ubiquitous, Amon is repositioning Qualcomm to meet the moment. The company has invested in the quickly growing automotive AI market, which is projected to grow by more than 65 % over the next five years. Qualcomm's automotive sector generated a record$1.1 billion in revenue in the first quarter of 2026, marking its second consecutive quarter surpassing$1 billion.