Qualcomm CEO Predicts Shift from Smartphones Toward AI Wearables and Autonomous Agents

Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said the smartphone-centric world the company helped build is coming to an end. In an interview conducted at Qualcomm’s San Diego headquarters with Fortune Editor in Chief Alyson Shontell for the Titans and Disruptors of Industry podcast, Amon stated that Qualcomm is working with OpenAI, Meta, and others he declined to name on devices that replace the smartphone.

Amon described the new devices as things you wear including glasses, jewelry, pins, and pendants centered on an autonomous agent.

"There are some secret form factors that I cannot tell you about," Amon said. " He outlined what he calls the “ecosystem of you” consisting of glasses with cameras, earbuds, and an agent that ties them together. "If AI understands what we say, what we hear, what we see—glasses are very close to your eyes, your ears, your mouth," Amon stated.

Amon said this year is the year of the agents in the sense that everyone is playing with giving artificial machines some autonomy over their lives. He added that this year the devices will be on the market but by 2027 and 2028 they’ll be unavoidable and it’s going to be very very natural.

Amon stated he is bullish on glasses as the leading form factor but that competition will be too fierce to produce a single winner because not everybody wears the same clothes or the same glasses.

The interview was recorded before TF International Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo reported in late April that Qualcomm and MediaTek are jointly designing a custom chip for an OpenAI smartphone with Luxshare manufacturing it. Ming-Chi Kuo projected mass production of the OpenAI smartphone chip in 2028 with annual shipments of 300 to 400 million units.

Qualcomm shares jumped as much as 13% following Ming-Chi Kuo’s late April report, though neither Qualcomm nor the other companies confirmed the report. A more recent Ming-Chi Kuo note dated May 5 states the phone chip may now go to MediaTek alone with mass production fast-tracked to early 2027. Amon pointed to an earlier example from China as proof of concept.

ByteDance launched the Doubao Mobile Assistant on a ZTE-made handset called the Nubia M153 in December. The Nubia M153 is a phone in which the AI agent operates the software navigating apps, booking tickets, and making payments. The initial run of the Doubao Mobile Assistant on the Nubia M153 was roughly 30,000 units and it sold out.

Tencent CEO Pony Ma called the Doubao Mobile Assistant device extremely unsafe and irresponsible. Meituan, WeChat, and Alibaba moved within days to restrict Doubao’s access to their apps. ByteDance is planning a second-generation device for the second quarter of 2026.

"Nobody paid attention to that, but we said it on the last earnings call," Amon stated. "The control point of the industry is changing. It’s not about the OS and the App Store. " Amon stated that like every new technology you can misuse it and there are going to be some drawbacks but in aggregate AI has the capability to empower people similar to the smartphone.

Fortune first convened its Brainstorm Tech event in 2001. Fortune Brainstorm Tech will be held in Aspen from June 8–10 to mark 25 years of the event. @FortuneMagazine reported all details of the interview and surrounding developments.