Amon, who runs Qualcomm Inc., the world’s biggest maker of smartphone processors, envisions an AI-powered smartphone that, according to him, is fundamentally different from today’s smartphones, which primarily run apps and generative AI features. For Amon, the era when users pick up a phone, find an app, launch it and issue commands is coming to an end. “We are moving from apps and assistants into agents, and we are just at the beginning of the agentic age,” he said.

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“In the agentic age, AI can understand your intent. That’s how agents are going to do things for you: they understand context, reason, plan and remember, and then act on the user’s behalf,” he explained, outlining what he meant by an AI smartphone.

“The phone is not going to go anywhere but we can now clearly see how your phone is going to interact with these new agent experiences. How are we going to have the coexistence of the old and the new? The reason the phone is also not going to go anywhere is because the phone is unique to you. It’s always with you. It’s personalised and customised to you,” Amon added.

However, the AI experience that Amon teased is incomplete without “trust” and “convenience.” “A great agentic experience will begin with trust that the agent is going to act on your behalf. It needs to be secure, it needs to be private, and it needs to put the user in control,” he said.

Qualcomm’s move to make the AI smartphone and the ecosystem of AI personal devices comes right at the company is unveiling new Android mobile chips, which are designed for on-device AI to better compete with Apple’s A20 Pro in iPhones.

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The new chips, branded under the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 brand, will be built using Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.’s 2-nanometer manufacturing process and will power premium, flagship smartphones from companies including Motorola, Xiaomi and Oppo, among others.

Qualcomm is introducing two versions of the chip, with one having additional capabilities and carrying the “Extreme” branding.

Both chips feature an Oryon CPU with two 5GHz Prime cores and six 4GHz Performance cores. The new mobile chipsets also include a graphics processing unit (GPU) and a neural processing unit (NPU) to handle AI workloads, including agents running in the background. Qualcomm has also added security features to control agents’ access to sensitive data.

Wednesday’s launch of Qualcomm’s new chips comes at a time when the overall smartphone market is expected to decline by 16.7 per cent, according to IDC. A global memory shortage, rising prices, inflation and geopolitical tensions have put a dent in demand for smartphones. Phone brands are responding to the subdued demand by focusing on flagship smartphones, which typically offer better profit margins.

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Similar to what Apple teased during its recent fall event, where new CEO John Ternus introduced the idea of an “intelligent personal hub”, Qualcomm is positioning smartphones powered by its AI chips as an “AI hub” capable of processing AI models and generating tokens without relying on the cloud. “The experience has to be personal and understand our context. It has to be proactive, not intrusive, and responsive in the moment you need it, with the ability to continue across different devices,” Amon said.

The writer is in Maui, Hawaii, attending the Snapdragon Summit at the invitation of Qualcomm.