Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said during an interview on CNBC’s “The Tech Download” podcast on June 16 that AI agents will become the “new apps” and will gradually replace traditional ways users interact with devices. He revealed that Qualcomm is currently advancing more than 40 new AI hardware designs, covering form factors such as smart glasses, smart jewelry, earphones with built-in cameras, wearable badge-style devices, and smart watches. These devices will use a “chosen agent” as the central hub to automatically complete users’ daily tasks without needing to open traditional apps. “The variety of form factors is very, very broad,” Amon said in the interview. He is particularly optimistic about the prospects of smart glasses, noting that current shipments have reached the “tens of millions” level and predicting they will rise to the “hundreds of millions” level “within the next few years,” potentially rivaling smartphones in scale.
Amon positioned 2026 as the “year one of AI agents,” arguing that the competitive focus is shifting from operating systems and app stores to “which agent you choose,” and that this will reshape the distribution and monetization logic for app developers and service providers. Qualcomm currently provides chip support in approximately 5 billion devices worldwide. This strategic shift is intended to signal to the market that Qualcomm will leverage on-device AI computing power and low-power architecture as its core competitiveness, moving early to seize the market for new wearable AI hardware beyond smartphones, while also collaborating with Microsoft to advance the Project Solara chip-to-cloud platform for agent computing. Qualcomm’s stock rose about 4% on the day.