Qualcomm CEO predicts 2026 will be the year of the AI agent – East Bay Times

By Vlad Savov, Bloomberg

Qualcomm Inc. Chief Executive Officer Cristiano Amon, speaking this week at the MWC Barcelona conference, said the incoming tide of artificial intelligence agents will transform the wider digital ecosystem.

While delivering a keynote address Tuesday at the mobile industry’s biggest annual gathering, Amon said 2026 will be the year of agents. These services — capable of performing complex, multistep tasks or proactively doing things for the user — require vast amounts of data and real-time context, which will elevate the importance of all manner of devices as data sources, Amon argued.

“We are going to move from a smartphone-centric, app-centric digital ecosystem to an agent center,” Amon said. “The agent becomes the center. They don’t only respond to you. They observe, they interpret, they act.”

In place of the current approach, where the user initiates everything via a specific application, future technology will be more geared toward enabling agents and tasks. That could potentially make a smartwatch, smart glasses or a wearable camera device as important as the smartphone in providing continuous awareness of the user’s environment.

A day earlier at MWC, San Diego-based Qualcomm introduced its new Snapdragon Wear Elite chipset, designed specifically to power smaller and wearable gadgets with on-device AI processing. The company envisions its customers building everything from pendants and pins to smart headphones and watches with integrated AI and sensors to feed personalized agents.