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.