Qualcomm is preparing for what it believes could be the biggest transformation in consumer technology since the smartphone era, with Chief Executive Cristiano Amon revealing that the chipmaker is working on more than 40 new artificial intelligence-powered device designs as the industry shifts toward AI agents capable of carrying out tasks on behalf of users.
Speaking in a wide-ranging interview on CNBC’s “The Tech Download” podcast, Amon outlined a future in which AI assistants become the primary interface between humans and technology, reducing reliance on traditional apps and opening the door to an entirely new generation of wearable devices.
His comments provide one of the clearest indications yet that the semiconductor industry is positioning itself for a post-smartphone world, where AI-powered glasses, earbuds, watches, pins, and even jewelry could become as important as mobile phones are today.
The remarks also carry significant implications for technology giants, including Apple, Samsung, Meta, Google, and OpenAI, all of which are racing to establish their positions in the emerging AI hardware market.
AI Agents Become the New Battleground
Qualcomm’s strategy is centered on the belief that AI agents will fundamentally change how consumers interact with technology. Agents are widely viewed as the next evolution of digital assistants such as Siri, Gemini, and ChatGPT. Rather than responding to simple prompts, they are expected to understand context, make decisions, and perform complex, multi-step tasks across different applications and services.
Amon argued that this transition could dramatically reduce the need for users to manually navigate software.
“Apps are not dead,” he said. “But apps are going to change.”
“Those agents are going to be the new app,” he added.
The shift could redefine the software ecosystem that has dominated the technology industry for nearly two decades.
Today, consumers typically open individual applications for banking, shopping, messaging, travel bookings, and entertainment. In an agent-driven future, users may simply tell an AI assistant what they want, with the agent handling the interactions behind the scenes.
Amon cited banking as an example, describing a scenario where a user could instantly retrieve transaction information without opening an application or manually searching through account histories.
The broader implication is that AI companies may gain greater control over digital experiences while traditional app developers face increasing pressure to adapt their products to agent-based systems.
Amon said Qualcomm is already preparing for that future.
“I think there’s going to be a lot of experimentation with different form factors,” he said.
“Right now, we have over 40 designs of those devices, and I’m telling you, the types of form factors are very, very broad.”
The company is working with manufacturers on a wide range of AI-powered products, including smart glasses, watches, wearable pins, camera-equipped earbuds, and even jewelry. Unlike smartphones, these devices are designed to remain constantly connected to users and their surroundings, enabling AI systems to maintain awareness of context and respond more naturally.
“The principle is something that you wear, something [that] is with you all the time, something that can see the world around you, so you have context and have the ability for you to access an agent and talk to the agent,” Amon explained.
The concept aligns with the industry’s growing focus on ambient computing, where technology operates continuously in the background rather than requiring users to interact through screens and keyboards.
Why Smart Glasses Could Become the Next Smartphone
Among the various form factors, Amon expressed particular confidence in smart glasses, a category attracting increasing investment from major technology companies.
Meta has already launched AI-enabled glasses through its partnership with Ray-Ban, while Samsung and several other manufacturers are developing competing products.
According to Amon, adoption is accelerating much faster than many investors appreciate.
“Smart glasses shipments are now in the order of multiple tens of millions,” he said.
He believes the category could soon experience explosive growth.
“In a couple of years,” Amon said, shipments could reach the “order of hundreds of millions of glasses and could become as big as smartphones.”
That is a bold prediction considering that approximately 1.26 billion smartphones were shipped globally in 2025, according to Counterpoint Research.
Yet supporters of smart glasses argue that they solve one of AI’s biggest challenges: providing constant access to digital assistants without requiring users to stare at a screen.
If AI agents become the primary interface for computing, smart glasses could emerge as the most natural platform for delivering information, navigation, communications, and augmented reality experiences.
The transition toward AI-centric devices is also opening opportunities for companies that historically focused on software rather than hardware. Amon pointed to OpenAI’s acquisition of io, the startup founded by former Apple design chief Jony Ive, as evidence of this shift.
“All the devices that we wear become endpoints for agents, and those AI companies understand they have to win those endpoints from agents,” he said.
The statement highlights an increasingly important dynamic in the AI race. Companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are no longer competing solely through software models. They are increasingly exploring hardware as a way to secure direct access to users and build ecosystems around their AI platforms.
For traditional hardware leaders such as Apple and Samsung, this creates a new competitive threat from firms that previously operated almost entirely in software.
Beyond hardware sales, Amon suggested that access to user data is emerging as a major motivation behind the push into AI devices. He argued that future wearables will generate information on a scale far beyond what is currently available to AI companies.
Those devices will continuously collect information about environments, behaviors, preferences, and interactions, creating vast streams of real-world data.
“So those companies want to have access to the data, because it’s important to train future models,” Amon said.
The data collected by AI-enabled devices could become one of the most strategically valuable assets in the technology industry.
As large language models become increasingly similar in performance, proprietary datasets may emerge as a critical competitive advantage, helping companies build more personalized AI systems and maintain leadership positions.
Amon added that companies will also use the information to create highly customized AI experiences tailored to individual users.
Qualcomm’s Biggest Opportunity Since the Smartphone Boom
For Qualcomm, the rise of AI agents represents a potentially transformative opportunity. The company already provides chips used in smartphones, personal computers, automobiles, and connected devices. A proliferation of AI-powered wearables could significantly expand Qualcomm’s addressable market.
However, Amon acknowledged that current chip architectures were not designed for the coming wave of AI-native devices.
Smaller form factors require processors that are more powerful, more energy-efficient, and capable of running sophisticated AI workloads directly on the device.
“Our entire roadmap is in a process of upgrade right now,” he said.
“An entire roadmap, because I believe none of the devices we have today are prepared for the future.”
The statement underscores how AI is forcing semiconductor companies to rethink product development strategies. Future devices will need to process increasingly complex AI models locally while maintaining long battery life and operating within compact designs.
That challenge is driving a new race among chipmakers to build processors optimized for AI workloads rather than traditional computing tasks.
Qualcomm’s vision backs a growing belief across Silicon Valley that artificial intelligence is not simply another software upgrade but the foundation of an entirely new computing paradigm.
In that future, smartphones will remain important but may no longer sit at the center of users’ digital lives.
“The phone is around the agent. The new classes of devices … are going to be around the agent as well,” Amon said.
“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.”
