At Snapdragon Summit 2025, Cristiano Amon, president and CEO of Qualcomm, set a clear agenda: move beyond a phone-first world and put AI agents at the center of daily computing. The company marked the event’s 10th anniversary by outlining how cloud and edge AI, new device roles, and next-gen connectivity will reshape how you work, connect, and build products.
A Decade In, a New Phase Begins
The summit turned into a brief history lesson before pivoting hard to the future. Amon’s message: Snapdragon’s next phase is “AI everywhere,” not just in phones but across PCs, cars, wearables, and glasses. He framed the work as a yearly reinvention mandate: success resets every fall when new chips ship.
Every year we have to reinvent ourselves and do something incredible… Doing a great chip one year means nothing until we can do it again the next year.
The Strategic Bet: AI Is the New UI
Amon’s thesis is simple and disruptive: the user interface is no longer icons and menus. It’s an AI that understands speech, vision, context, and intent, processed where you are.
- AI becomes the front door to every task.
- The edge matters because the “UI” now lives with the human, not just in the cloud.
- Apps shift from passive tools to agentic services that anticipate and act.
Everything is a prompt to a model that becomes the new user interface of computer devices.
From Phone-Centric to Agent-Centric
The phone stays, but it’s no longer the star. The agent orchestrates an “ecosystem of you” across watches, earbuds, glasses, and rings. Humans already wear these objects; the change is that each engages the agent directly instead of simply extending a handset.
- Wearables evolve from accessories to primary inputs.
- The agent mediates notifications, context, and action across devices.
- Horizontal platforms win when users mix brands and form factors.
Those devices… are no longer just extending the functionality of the phone, but… engaging directly with the agent.
Cloud + Edge: A Hybrid AI Model
Amon rejects the false choice between cloud and device. Training lives in the cloud; immediacy, privacy, and context live at the edge. The company expects model architectures to embrace mixtures of experts, distillation, quantization, and local steering across a collection of models.
- Cloud: heavy training, aggregation, refinement.
- Edge: capture, quick reasoning, action, fine-tuning on personal data.
- Net effect: a dynamic, adaptive network of intelligence.
AI… is going to be both cloud and edge… The edge complements the cloud. It’s immediate, it’s personal, it has context.
Silicon Priorities: Modems, Memory, Low-Power AI
Delivering agentic computing changes chip design. Amon outlined the priorities:
- Agentic modems for voice-first interactions across cloud and edge.
- New memory architectures to relieve AI bandwidth constraints.
- Always-on, low-power AI that observes, reasons, and assists without killing battery.
We have to have a completely new architecture for memory… very low power, high performance processor for AI.
App Model: From Tap to Task
“Agentic apps” will anticipate needs and act across calendars, contacts, and payments. Amon described the experience as continuous, not like launching a separate app for every step.
They will anticipate your needs… You could simply say, ‘just pay this bill for me.
Connectivity: Laying Track for Edge AI and 6G
If the edge is the brainstem of personal AI, networking is the spinal cord. Amon positioned 6G as the connective tissue between cloud and devices, built for AI-native efficiency and sensor-rich awareness, with pre-commercial devices as early as 2028.
6G… is designed to be the connection between the cloud and the other devices… with perception and sensor data.
The “Ecosystem of You”: Day-in-the-Life Demos
Qualcomm showed agent assistants that see what you see through glasses, hear what you hear via earbuds, and coordinate across phone and watch. The assistant nudges you about meetings, resolves calendar conflicts, and handles errands like reservations and check-ins. The same paradigm extends to cars, which already “see” through ADAS cameras and can adopt natural language and vision without legacy UI baggage.
The agent… will move with you, learn from you, and be the most personal technology ever.
Live Agents and Partner Signal
On stage, two live agents — Pulse for planning and Vela for design — handled party prep as a playful proof of concept. Amon also underscored that Snapdragon’s strength is aggregated innovation with partners across phones, PCs, and automotive.
Snapdragon is at the heart… building a future where your technology truly understands you.
Cristiano Amon’s keynote underscored how Qualcomm wants to define the next decade of computing: AI agents as the new user interface, an edge-plus-cloud model for intelligence, and silicon built for constant awareness. His vision moves Qualcomm beyond mobile leadership into a central role in PCs, cars, wearables, and the broader connected ecosystem. The Snapdragon brand is positioned not as a component provider but as the engine enabling what Amon calls the “ecosystem of you.”
