Qualcomm CEO says agents will become the new app, cites more than 40 device designs

Qualcomm chief executive Cristiano Amon says the company is working on more than 40 designs of new AI devices, CNBC reports from an interview on its “The Tech Download” podcast. He listed jewellery, earbuds with cameras, pins and watches among the form factors.

Amon described a shift in what devices are organised around:

The phone is around the agent. The new classes of devices … 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.

He said phones will not disappear. On software, he told CNBC that apps are “not dead” but “are going to change”, adding: “Those agents are going to be the new app.” His example was an agent that retrieves banking transaction details without the user navigating the app.

On smart glasses, Amon put current shipments in the “order of multiple tens of millions” a year and said that in “a couple of years” the category could reach the “order of hundreds of millions of glasses and could become as big as smartphones”. CNBC cites Counterpoint Research figures of 1.26 billion smartphones shipped in 2025, about 3 percent above the prior year.

Amon linked the entry of AI companies into hardware, such as OpenAI’s purchase of Jony Ive’s startup io, to both agent endpoints and training data, saying the devices will gather data on a scale that is “exponentially larger” than the data used to train current models. He said Qualcomm’s chip roadmap is being reworked in response: “An entire roadmap, because I believe none of the devices we have today are prepared for the future.”

The full interview is available as a video on CNBC.