Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon Bets the Company’s Future on AI Agents and Smart Glasses

The next major computing revolution will not be a device you hold in your hand—it will be something you wear. Qualcomm President and CEO Cristiano Amon has been delivering that message to the tech industry with increasing urgency throughout 2026, betting the chip giant's future on a post-smartphone world powered by AI agents. Declaring 2026 the "year of agents," Amon is laying the groundwork for a computing paradigm where apps are replaced by intelligent assistants, and the smartphone's reign as the center of digital life comes to an end .

Amon's thesis is simple but radical: the smartphone-centric ecosystem that has dominated for the last 15 years is being displaced, and artificial intelligence agents are what comes next. He has used virtually every major stage—MWC Barcelona, Computex Taipei, the Semafor World Economy Summit, Fortune's Titans and Disruptors podcast, and CNBC's Tech Download podcast—to paint a cohesive picture of this transition, all while unveiling specific products and partnerships to back it up .

2026 Is the “Year of Agents” and Apps Are the First Casualty

On multiple occasions in 2026, Amon has made a blunt prediction: AI agents will replace apps in the same way that apps themselves once displaced desktop programs .

In a June 2026 interview on CNBC’s “The Tech Download” podcast, Amon explicitly stated that AI agents will become “the new app,” acting as intelligent assistants capable of executing complex, multi-step tasks on a user’s behalf across various services . He argues that while conventional AI chatbots were just the beginning, the real industry inflection point is widespread adoption of “agentic AI”—systems that understand user intent and execute tasks autonomously, without needing a user to open and navigate individual applications .

Amon sees 2026 as the tipping point, not just for the technology’s capability, but for commercial infrastructure. He predicted that every operating-system vendor will build an agent orchestrator into its software within months, making the shift inevitable . In his view, agents won't just exist on a phone; they will become the central hub of a user’s digital experience, accessible from any device a person happens to be wearing or using .

Smart Glasses and Wearables: The Next Smartphone-Scale Platform

If agents are the new apps, Amon’s bet is that smart glasses are the new smartphone. He envisions digital life shifting from a screen people stare at to “things you wear”—a category spanning smart glasses, camera-equipped earbuds, pins, pendants, watches, and even smart jewelry .

Amon has been most bullish on glasses, describing them as “very close to our senses, to our eyes, to our mouth, to our ears,” which makes them an ideal form factor for an always-on AI assistant that sees and hears the world in real time . He noted that smart glasses shipments are already running in the “multiple tens of millions” annually, and he believes they could scale to hundreds of millions within a few years to rival the size of the smartphone market .

Fortune reported that Amon predicts meaningful compute workloads will begin migrating from phones to new AI-first devices by 2028, with those devices becoming dominant within five years and serving hundreds of millions globally . The company’s internal vision centers on what Amon calls the “ecosystem of you” — a suite of personal, wearable devices that passively gather far more real-world context than a phone in your pocket ever can .

Over 40 New AI-Powered Device Designs in the Pipeline

This is not a long-term theory in a slide deck. In a June 16, 2026 CNBC interview, Amon revealed that Qualcomm is currently working on more than 40 designs for new AI-powered wearable devices. The form factors are, as he described, “very, very broad” and include jewelry, earbuds with built-in cameras, wearable pins and pendants, watches, and—most notably—different types of smart glasses .

To power this ecosystem, Qualcomm announced two new products on the same day. The Snapdragon Reality Elite platform is designed for mixed-reality glasses to run powerful on-device AI. The company also unveiled the Scalable Turnkey AI-Ready Toolkit (START), a combination of hardware modules and a software stack intended to let manufacturers bring AI devices to market faster .

The company is collaborating with key AI players on these devices. Amon told Fortune that Qualcomm is working with “pretty much all” of the major names in the AI industry, including OpenAI and Meta, on personal AI hardware projects. The exact nature of those collaborations hasn’t been detailed publicly, but the signal is clear: Qualcomm wants its silicon inside whatever consumer AI device ultimately wins, regardless of brand .

Why the Chip Architecture Has to Change—Completely

Beneath the focus on devices lies Amon’s most consequential business argument: the shift to AI agents demands a mandatory, global upgrade cycle for semiconductor architectures.

Current chips in phones, PCs, and cars are designed for what Amon calls an “application-centric” world, optimized for burst-mode processing when a user opens a specific app. The agent paradigm, by contrast, requires persistent, always-on AI running in the background, constantly listening, watching, and reasoning with context . Amon told CNBC that the computing capabilities shipping in today’s devices are architecturally insufficient for this future workload, which means the entire installed base—which he frames as 6 billion smartphones, 2 billion wearables, 2 billion PCs, and 500 million vehicles—will eventually need to be refreshed .

Qualcomm’s strategic bet rests on its Neural Processing Unit (NPU), which it is positioning as a core, non-negotiable component for any future device. The company is pushing the NPU not as a feature for better photography or quick app opens, but as the engine for continuous on-device AI inference that makes an agent experience seamless . Amon has described this as an “agent-centric hardware thesis” where the primary workload on a device is running an AI agent, not rendering a user interface for a human to tap .

Supply Chain and Industry Implications

Amon is using the agent thesis to rebut a narrative of weak consumer electronics demand. He has argued in multiple appearances that the AI agent transition will force a device upgrade cycle more significant than the current market appreciates. Addressing analyst concerns about sluggish end-demand, he has been highly bullish that the agent era will drive fresh silicon demand across phones, PCs, wearables, and automobiles .

The supply chain dynamics in China are one example of current softness that Qualcomm expects to reverse. Amon has noted that Chinese handset OEMs have been unusually cautious with inventory build plans due to memory industry dynamics, and that Qualcomm’s own China Android shipments were “meaningfully below the scale of end consumer handset demand” because OEMs were drawing down channel inventory. He expects the shift to agent-centric devices will re-stoke that demand .

Investor sentiment appears aligned with the strategy. When the 40+ device pipeline was announced on June 16, Qualcomm shares rose nearly 3% on the day, signaling confidence that the company has a growth story beyond its traditional dependence on the smartphone cycle .

Qualcomm's 6G Play as AI-Native Infrastructure

Amon is also repositioning Qualcomm’s network business around the same thesis. At MWC Barcelona in March 2026, he recast the narrative around 6G entirely, arguing it should not be viewed as “faster 5G” but as an AI-native network built around three pillars: connectivity, computing, and sensing. His core argument was that “the mission of 6G is going to be the wireless technology for the age of AI and for AI everywhere” .

Qualcomm is targeting pre-commercial 6G demonstrations in 2028 with initial commercial rollouts expected from 2029 . By tying 6G directly to the agent vision, Amon is ensuring that the network itself becomes part of Qualcomm’s vertical story—every device running an agent will need a network purpose-built to support context-rich, high-bandwidth AI interactions, and Qualcomm intends to provide the silicon on both ends of that connection .

Bottom line: Cristiano Amon is making a definitive wager that AI agents will decouple computing from the smartphone form factor—replacing apps on the software side and forcing a total architectural overhaul on the hardware side. With more than 40 device designs in the works, specific partnerships with major AI labs, new chip platforms shipping now, and a 6G strategy built to match, Qualcomm is positioning itself not just to survive a post-smartphone world, but to provide the underlying silicon foundation for it.