‘AI is the new UI’: Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon says smartphones are entering the agentic era
Follow UsSpeaking at the Snapdragon Summit 2026 in Maui, Hawaii, Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon outlined a pivotal shift in the mobile industry.
“We are on the beginning of agentic age and Snapdragon is the platform built for it,” Amon said, while adding AI is the new UI.
Meanwhile, Qualcomm unveiled two new mobile platforms from ultra flagships: Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 Extreme.
Speaking at the Snapdragon Summit 2026 in Maui, Hawaii, Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon outlined a pivotal shift in the mobile industry: smartphones are evolving from app-driven touchscreens into context-aware, agentic AI hubs. He said that AI has changed so quickly in the last few years and rather than replacing smartphones, AI agents will fundamental change how we interact with them which will shift the focus from manual user input to seamless background execution.
Survey“We are on the beginning of agentic age and Snapdragon is the platform built for it,” he said, while adding AI is the new UI.
Amon emphasised that over the past 20 years, mobile computing relied on opening individual applications one by one. In the agentic era, an AI agent will understand intent and context, plan, reason and complete multi-step actions across various apps and cloud services without requiring user micro-management.
“We are going from phone centre model to agentic centric model. Going forward, agents will become the centre of experience. We can finally see what an AI phone truly means,” he said, as Qualcomm unveiled two new mobile platforms from ultra flagships: Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 Extreme.
Through a bunch of demo use cases and examples, Qualcomm explained and teased how this new experience will work. Instead of users hunting for tickets or checking calendars manually, an agent will proactively notify users (eg, about concert tickets or schedule openings) and handle purchasing or coordination autonomously with simple confirmation.
Amon also emphasised on the privacy part and stated that the final decision-making authority always remaining in the user’s hands.
“The permission to use will be very important. And, so is context. Because the phone is very personal and specific to you. Agentic AI will need your phones to do a lot more than just execute tasks for you,” he explained.
To run complex AI agents quietly in the background without draining battery or causing thermal throttling, hardware architecture must adapt. Qualcomm aims to bring data-center-level computing techniques, closer coupling of memory and accelerators, to on-device chips, enabling processing for up to 1 million tokens per day locally.
Importantly, the AI agent experience won’t be confined to a phone. It will act as a unified brain across an interconnected network of PCs, smart glasses, wearables and connected vehicles. This was resonated by Qualcomm Senior Vice President and CMO Don McGuire who detailed how the company plans to transition these technical capabilities to the mass market:
McGuire highlighted that adoption relies on trust and familiarity rather than raw specs. Highlighting partners like Samsung (Galaxy Watch Ultra 2), Motorola (Razr series), Meta (smart glasses), Lenovo, and Rivian, Qualcomm is positioning Snapdragon as the foundational ecosystem engine powering daily AI touchpoints across diverse device categories.
