AI agents to become centre of our digital lives, says Qualcomm CEO

Qualcomm has outlined its vision for an AI-driven future where autonomous AI agents will perform tasks independently across devices and eventually become the centre of users' digital lives, reducing the pivotal role currently played by smartphones.

At Computex 2026, a global technology and AI exhibition in Taipei, Qualcomm President and CEO Cristiano R Amon said 2026 would be "the year of agents" as artificial intelligence evolves beyond responding to prompts and starts taking actions on behalf of users.

Qualcomm has a significant presence in India with one of its largest employee bases outside the United States in the country. It also operates major research, software and hardware design centres in Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Chennai.

"2026 is the year of agents and it's now how AI is really evolving," Amon said in his keynote address at the global technology event organised by the Taiwan External Trade Development Council.

Amon said AI is evolving from being a tool that assists users to becoming an intelligent system capable of understanding goals, breaking them into tasks, using digital tools and completing complex workflows with minimal human supervision.

According to Qualcomm, the technology, known as agentic AI, differs from conventional generative AI by acting as a digital worker rather than merely responding to queries.

These AI agents can independently execute multi-step tasks and assist users in both personal and professional settings.

Major technology companies have increasingly positioned AI agents as the next stage of AI development, with the systems designed to perform tasks across applications and devices with limited human intervention.

According to Amon, the emergence of AI agents will fundamentally change the way people interact with technology.

Amon said, currently, the smartphone is the centre of everyone's digital life, and everything revolves around the phone ecosystem. "The agents will become the centre of the digital experience," he said.

Amon said AI agents would not be tied to any single ecosystem. Instead, every connected device, from smartphones and smartwatches to laptops and vehicles, would become an endpoint through which users interact with them.

He said the shift would require a new generation of devices designed specifically for AI-driven workloads.

"Today's devices were not designed for those experiences. You will require a different kind of device when agentic AI becomes the number one AI function in our daily lives, especially for personal computing," he said.

Amon stressed that power efficiency would become critical as both users and AI agents simultaneously utilise computing resources.

"If it is challenging to make your phone last all day with you operating it, what happens when both you and the agent are operating it? You need a very strong and power-efficient CPU for the orchestration of tasks," he said.

Highlighting Qualcomm's future roadmap, Amon offered a glimpse of a new product platform, Dragonfly. He said further details would be announced later this month.

Qualcomm's focus on agentic AI is part of a broader strategy to diversify beyond its traditional smartphone-chip business and expand into high-growth markets such as automotive, personal computing, industrial IoT, and edge AI.

The company has emerged as a major player in the software-defined vehicle industry through its Snapdragon Digital Chassis platform, with automotive design wins worth about $45 billion and automotive revenue exceeding $1 billion in a recent quarter.

Meanwhile, Qualcomm and Tata Electronics are collaborating to manufacture Qualcomm Automotive Modules for digital cockpits, infotainment, and connectivity solutions in India.

Industry experts view software-defined vehicles, edge AI, and autonomous AI agents as some of the most significant technology shifts of the coming decade, as computing increasingly moves from cloud-only systems to intelligent, AI-enabled devices operating locally with lower latency, improved privacy, and greater energy efficiency.

With inputs from PTI