Qualcomm CEO Says AI Agents Could Drive a Smartphone Upgrade Supercycle

Qualcomm’s Cristiano Amon thinks the phone upgrade cycle might wake up again, and AI agents are the reason. His pitch is simple: if software starts using your apps, understanding your personal context, and acting for you, the handset stops being a slab you tolerate and becomes the place where the new AI experience lives.

He compares the moment to the early iPhone years, when nobody yet knew which apps would define the platform. This time, he expects agents to do the defining. He says AI companies are already pushing Qualcomm to support on-phone models with at least 100 billion parameters by 2028, with AI running continuously in the background. That could finally give some buyers a reason to replace phones they’ve kept because memory prices made upgrades feel pointless.

But Amon isn’t betting only on phones. He sees a jumble of AI wearables being tried out right now — earbuds with cameras, jewelry, pendants, badges — and says smart glasses are the category he likes best. They sit closest to your eyes, ears, and mouth, which matters if the assistant is supposed to be aware of the world around you. He also thinks there may still be room for another form factor nobody has settled on yet. His comparison: it feels like an iPod moment, where one obvious product hasn’t quite emerged.

Qualcomm’s reach gives it a stake in more than one future. The company supplies chips for Android phones, Meta’s smart glasses, and coming devices from AI firms including OpenAI. It is also trying to push into data centers, where Amon sees an opening because Qualcomm’s whole history is about getting more out of limited battery power. The company’s acquisition of Modular is meant to offer developers an open software layer that can run across different chips, which Amon says should let Qualcomm compete on hardware instead of software lock-in.

And then there’s 6G, which he frames less as a faster phone network and more as a way to turn devices into “walking cameras on this world.” In his telling, that could mean constant high-definition uploads from glasses, plus radio signals being used like radar to map the physical world for robots and drone detection. He expects demos at the 2028 LA Olympics, early deployments around 2029 or 2030, and wider rollout after that.