AI agents are coming to your devices

0:01I've got something so exciting to tell you all. And no, it wasn't the Pokemon cards that I got this weekend, which were awesome. It's the fact that we are in a brand new studio out of CNBC's London offices. We've got the fancy lights. We've got some new cameras. We've got a great crew. It is a bit hot, but it is wonderful. That's the intro. So I guess welcome to the Tech Download.

0:27I'm Arjun Karpal, senior tech correspondent here at CNBC. And we're kicking off with a super interesting guest, Cristiano Aman, who is the CEO of Qualcomm. Now, if you don't know Qualcomm, just a quick rundown. They are one of the biggest semiconductor companies in the world. They design what are known as system on chips. And we'll get into that. SOCs, you may have heard this term, under the Snapdragon brand name. These are chips that go into smartphones and they have loads of different components on them. And they power loads of smartphones in the world. They power other kinds of devices as well, such as laptops.

1:03And so the CEO has a great view into consumer electronics and effectively where this industry is going in the age of AI. So we're going to be talking about all the things, the hype of the devices coming up. And he tells us a little bit about some of those devices that are not yet revealed as well. He's going to talk about how AI is changing our relationship with the core device of the smartphone. He's going to also talk about what AI means for the way Qualcomm needs to start thinking about designing the chips that go into our future devices as well. One of the words you're going to hear a lot of in this conversation and other episodes in the future is the word agentic AI.

1:39The idea here is that we started off with this chatbot, this kind of input where we'd ask it questions and give us a response. But actually, these AI companies are trying to take that a step further. They want these AI chatbots to be like assistants, effectively, like agents working on behalf of us, at times autonomously carrying out tasks on our behalf. Then you're going to hear a little bit about some of the other innovations that are making AI devices possible from the Qualcomm CEO. One of those is something called MCP or Model Context Protocol. This is effectively an open source system for AI assistants to connect and communicate with other data and also other apps.

2:20It's important if you think about it, if you want your agent to be able to go and carry out stuff on another app, for example. And then the final innovation you're going to hear about is something called the cloud versus edge processing. So a lot of the times when we're using these AI chatbots, effectively your data is being sent to the cloud, it's processed there, and then comes back to your device and you effectively get your answer. But a lot of device makers are thinking, how can we run those AI models and those AI processes actually on the device? that could mean it's faster and more secure.

2:55And that's something that Qualcomm is working on with its chips as well. I'm excited to bring you this conversation with Cristiano Amon, the CEO of Qualcomm. Welcome to The Tech Download. Cristiano, thanks so much for joining me on The Tech Download. Very happy to be here. Looking forward to this conversation, Arjun. So Cristiano, look, we're going to be talking today about AI devices, the future of how we're going to interact with our personal electronics in the future, given how AI is proliferating, so many of these devices as well. But I think first, it's important for our audience, just the layout.

3:32When we talk about AI devices, an AI smartphone, an AI laptop, what does that exactly mean? 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. what those devices are going to be and what they'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 is going to operate the phone for you. But then there's going to be new classes of devices that we're going to wear.

4:07And 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's very logical that we're going to interact with those devices close to our senses, close 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.

4:51And that's going to be a new class of devices. They're going to be part of our mobile experience. You mentioned something interesting about large language models, and that goes to the point about what's changed to allow devices these days to be more personal? Okay, it's a number of technologies. I'm going to break it down for you. I think the first one is those large language models got pretty good. And they got pretty good. And they also got very specialized. Not only language models, but also visual models. You're starting to hear about words like multimodal, that you have models that are going to take different inputs.

5:33It's going to take audio. It's going to take language. It's going to take vision. You start hearing about smaller models, mix of experts, models that are very specific for certain functions. You started to hear about distillation of models, models that there's a big model that got trained, and then you became 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 OpenClaw, those techniques called orchestrators, that agents that go operate your computer, your device for you, going to look at your data.

6:28It's going to 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 know, you don't need to touch. You just needed 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. So, Cristiano, let's tackle some of those. You talked about the models because we've been discussing a lot about large language models, these huge, massive models that have been trained that are then being underpinning these chatbots that so many people use.

7:20But there is also discussion about more of these models becoming smaller to run on the device rather than in the cloud. And that's a big part of what you're working on at Qualcomm. How important is the development of models right now in terms of underpinning the future of some of the agentic AI experience which you've been talking about? 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 and the 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 two years ago, a year ago.

8:05There was a lot of debate about, is this model going to run on the cloud or is this model going to run on the edge? Can I run this exact model that is running on the cloud on the devices on 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, and you're probably going to tell me probably over 200 apps, organize it in folders. And if I ask you, let's go one by one and see which app run on, what portion of the app run on the cloud, with a portion of the app running a 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.

8:51So 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 they're modeled, they're specific, that are going to be running on the edge. their models, their specific, they're going to be running on the cloud and they're going to go work together as one. And there's actually an industry term now called compute continue. It's going to be like one integrated system about this. 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 a smart glass, and I'm going to interact the way I'm interacting with you right now, I need to have an instant response.

9:35I may be walking on the street and I say, like, 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. So the same thing. If I read a menu and I say, what does it say? You want an instant response. If I look up QR code, please pay this for me. So what is happening is the compute is naturally breaking down in what's going to happen on the edge, what's going to happen on the cloud. They're going to be integrated. One is not going to function without the other.

10:16And I think that's going to kind of define how we think about your future of consumer electronics and devices in the age of AI. And I'm just going to tell you, it's no different than what happened to cars, what happened to robots. Actually, those are great examples of edge AI. You know, they actually run in the robot and they run into the car.

10:39Executive Decisions is the new podcast from CNBC, where I ask powerful leaders about their decisions that changed everything. I'm Steve Sedgwick. Here's the CEO of the London Stock Exchange Group, Julia Hoggett. There is no justification whatsoever for not doing the right thing, even if the right thing is hard to do, which also means that if the context changes or the information changes it is absolutely fine to also change your mind that's executive decisions with me steve sedgwick get it wherever you're listening to this so let's get into this term ai devices what exactly it means well we've obviously got the smartphones but over the past few years it's been an explosion of course of all these different types of chatbots we're thinking open ai's chat gpt we're thinking anthropics claw, we're talking about Google's Gemini, all of these now, and they're getting much more sophisticated.

11:28And now device makers are thinking, how can we integrate all this AI into all of these different types of electronics? And ultimately, what does it mean for the way we're going to be using devices going forward? This part's really important because we're about to talk about different types of AI devices that are coming up. And you're going to hear mention of things like smart glasses. If you haven't seen those, you know, Meta produces some smart glasses, which have sort of a camera in them. Samsung, Qualcomm, and Google are all working on smart glasses. There's lots of companies looking at this space, many thinking this could be a new frontier for AI devices as well.

12:01The other thing we're going to mention here is AI pins. Now, you may have not have seen these kinds of devices because they were popular for a very fleeting moment in 2024. And it was a company called Humane, which bought one of these to market. It was basically a small square thing that you attach to your clothing. It had a camera in it, no screen, but you could talk to it and it'd give you answers. And it would also project text onto a surface, such as your hand or a table or something. And it was equipped with AI. And the project effectively flopped. It got some pretty bad reviews and you can read all the reasons why it didn't take off at that time.

12:39But it was a glimpse into the way device companies were thinking about the future of devices in a world of AI. And we are now starting to see more and more companies, non-traditional device companies looking at consumer electronics. One example is OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, which hired the famous Apple designer Johnny Ive to work on a device. So that's going to be very interesting whenever that's revealed. But it also shows you the way you are getting new entrants into this consumer electronic market and the way that we may be getting new styles of devices that we haven't seen before.

13:15One word that is a huge buzzword right now, we've mentioned it already, is this idea of agentic AI. Now, when I hear it being spoken about, the kind of utopia of it is effectively these AI systems are going to be able to autonomously do things on our behalf, like the most smart personal assistant out there. When it comes to a Gentic experience on consumer devices, what does that look like in your view? Okay, this is actually one of the questions I love answering because, you know, even though we have been changing the Qualcomm and we're becoming a much more diversified company, we're still, you know, one of the biggest providers of mobile technology.

14:01And 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, and I'm kind of convinced 2026 is going to be the year of agents. We're starting to see this now getting scaled. And those things became really popular and went viral, I think, on the internet when OpenClaw 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, operate your machine for you, go to the internet. And then what you saw happening, I remember, I think, you know, people are going in and buying computers.

14:47There's a lot of people buying Mac minis. They were sold out and they put it into their office and they install OpenClaw and let the running and consuming tokens like crazy going to their Entropic accounts and the OpenAI accounts consuming all the tokens. Now what that did, it show a path how we're going to interact with our computers. We are going to use our computers but the agents going to use our computers on our behalf and do things for you. Now in a mobile environment there's no way you're gonna get a backpack, put a car battery, put a Mac Mini and carry that alongside your phone. So those things are gonna happen in the phone and I think that's also going to define how from the phone experience given like more billions of people wear phones.

15:40So now we have clarity what is an AI phone and AI PC is and I'm gonna break that to you. What's gonna happen your phone is gonna have dual personas. Your phone will continue to be your phone. Phone is not gonna go anywhere. You're going to get your phone. When you pull up your phone out of your pocket, you're going to go to your apps and you're going to do those things. But the phone also is going to have those orchestrators, those claws. You're going to see between now and summer, you're going to see 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.

16:16And it's going to operate your phone on your behalf. It's going to go to your apps. You're going to give them instruction. It's so profound, this change, that even if I go a moment outside the phone, I'm just telling what happened with software companies, the whole SaaS industries. Now, software companies develop their software for a human to utilize, and there's a human interface to you, but also for an agent to utilize, to go into their software and do things. The way this is going to play out, it 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.

16:54I saw some examples that somebody has a meeting, and then another invitation come up and 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 he said, okay, can I reschedule this other meeting for you? And you say, yes. and the agent will call the person. If he needs to talk to a person, we'll send an email. We'll figure out how to reschedule the things for you based on your calendar. And slowly, we're going to get used with those new experiences. And over time, your phones are going to be doing both.

17:34It's going to be being operated by the agent and it's going to be operated by you. I'm just waiting for an agent that can clear my inboxes for me. That's the biggest thing. and christiano when you look at the roadmap then for this you said 2026 is going to be the year of the agents it fills the last two years a lot of smartphone companies have been talking about ai integrating into their devices but actually none of it has been a this kind of agentic type of experience you're describing do you believe that happens in 2026 and to what level I suppose. And then, you know, as you look forward with all the device partners you work in, what's the roadmap for that becoming more advanced?

18:20It's interesting. If you remember the transition from a feature phone to a smartphone, which is a huge transition, like the phone became a computer, what happened is the early days of the smartphone, the very early days, the apps that you had, it was the apps that come from the OEM, right? And so 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 and play around. But eventually what happened is the app store became available and developers starts 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, it didn't come from the OS itself, it didn't come from the OEM, but it actually come from developers.

19:11It is a platform, it's a computer. Actually the smartphone is the largest platform ever created by mankind. Okay, now let's do a parallel, what we saw on AI. AI happened. First application that we saw was chat box. People go in, they ask a question, they get an answer, then they started to do more advanced, summarize this to 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, it's kind of early days, but then something happened. Those orchestrators and those agents happened.

19:56And then everything started to change because now AI can become very useful and AI 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 started to be clear and those things started 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 in into the OS. because that becomes, oh, agents are the new apps. Those orchestrators becomes a new app store. And we're going to see the coexistence of the old and the new, you know, in the same device, because in the case of a phone, you only carry one device.

20:39You 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 PIN. 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, I think, set of possibilities as people create their own agents and agents started to operate devices on your behalf. We're going to talk about those new types of devices in a sec. But my first question on the back of that answer is, does this mean that apps are dead? They're not dead, but apps are going to change.

21:26Absolutely, 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, like you have a banking app. You have your bank of choice and you have the app. So you have a developer that the developer imagine how would the app going to be that most of the bank users are going to like it. What are the color? It's going to fit into a screen of your device. It's going to have a menu. 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 on the bank. This is my last transactions. This is my credit card.

22:04This 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. Okay, now that app in your phone, your banking app in your phone, 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 can 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 checkers account? And you're going to say, this is how much you have. What was my last three transactions?

22:41Can you please plot a graph for me about this? And then if you said, I want this information to be displayed to me in my screen, but no, I don't like the colors, how the app is. I want it to be a different color and it will render for you. So this is the difference. This is the fundamental difference how apps are going to evolve into agents. and 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 off my check-ins account.

23:18Notify what I'm done. That's going to be different than you. Open the app and go through the process yourself. And among many of the important things you said through this episode so far is that you believe the smartphone is still going to be critical. Do you believe this is still going to be central to the world of agentic AI? And how do you expect our relationship with our smartphone to change? Yes and no. So let me kind of 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 that the absolute center of our digital life is our smartphone, our most inseparable device.

24:08Everything is around the smartphone. Like the smartphone is like the sun. Every planet is around the smartphone. So much so that if you look of what was defined as a smart wearable, Those smart wearables, their job was to extend the functionality of the phone to you. Let's go to a simple thing as a smart watch. You will give your time. We'll send sensor data from you to the phone, and we'll get notifications from the phone back to you. And it's so integrated that actually you see how the industry actually works. The same phone company actually is the one that's doing a lot of the wearables and its ecosystem.

24:50There's a big change now. in the future, and it's a very near future, especially as agents started to take GetScale, 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, I think, for your digital life. And that's going to change the relationship of our devices.

25:33And 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 different. Remember when the smartphone arrived, some people said the laptop is dead. Absolutely, the laptop was never dead. The laptop's still here and is still strong, but the way you used to work on your laptop changed. Workloads shift. 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 into a laptop.

26:13That's where you go to your Facebook account. Now, most of 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, I think in summary is 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 now do your phone things, but you're going to run agents that is going to operate the phone for you.

26:46And then your experience that 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. So let's talk about those devices then, Cristiano, because you mentioned a few through this conversation. And maybe we should start with glasses, because, you know, this is a project you've been working on with Google and Samsung and we know they're going to, yeah, going to launch these this year as well. What do you think glasses are going to be the next most important device? A hundred percent. I look, the numbers speak for themselves.