Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said Tuesday (March 11) that artificial intelligence (AI) is ushering in the next fundamental shift in how humans interact with technology, describing it as a “generation change” poised to reshape the tech landscape and redefine user experiences across devices.
“We are at the beginning of a very big transition in technology,” Amon said during a speech at SXSW 2025 in Austin, Texas. “AI is a generation change. It’s going to change a lot how we interact with our computers.”
The CEO outlined a historical progression of how humans interacted with computers — from using an ASCII keyboard to type into a computer, to graphical and use of a mouse, to touchscreens on mobile devices. AI is ushering in the next leap forward.
“Something happened with the AI,” Amon said. “The computers can understand human language, and because the computer can understand human language, it changes again how we interact with computers.”
According to Amon, rather than navigating between different apps for specific tasks, users will interact with AI agents that understand context and can seamlessly perform tasks across multiple domains.
Today, “you go to different apps and do different things. But once the AI understands your intention, they are free. It can go to an app. It can go to another app,” Amon said. “Apps are built on top of the agent, so it changes, and it’s going to be this assistant that you have with you all the time.”
For example, a traveler on vacation takes photos and videos. The AI agent automatically organizes them and adds information. It can also suggest dining options based on its knowledge of the traveler’s preferences and juxtaposes that with its knowledge of eateries at the vacation spot. The AI agent does all these without asking the traveler to use different apps.
“You’re going to have different inputs, whether it’s voice and audio, or text. … Every text that you write could be a prompt for a model and for an agent to understand what you do and then be ready to help you when you need help,” Amon explained.
Amon emphasized that this transformation extends beyond smartphones to other devices, such as automobiles and wearable technology like augmented reality (AR) glasses.
Amon called AR glasses “wearable AI,” highlighting Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses as an example of this emerging technology. “When you wear those glasses, what you see the glass sees, what you hear the glass hears,” he explained, enabling seamless AI assistance based on real-world context.
He also described cars as “a new computing space” where agent-based interfaces are particularly well-suited, allowing drivers to interact naturally through voice and visual cues.
“The car is now a new computing space, like a phone was computing space. Your laptop’s a computing space,” Amon said. “This type of agent-based user experience is perfect when you are driving a car — voice is very natural, visual is very natural.”
Amon said AI as the new user interface could be ubiquitous within five years, with edge computing further hastening the transition.
This on-device AI processing is what Amon referred to as “AI at the edge.” This approach offers advantages in speed, privacy, reliability and cost compared to cloud-based alternatives, he said.
“When you do the processing on the device, it’s immediate. You don’t have to wait. It’s private. It’s your data. It’s your personal graph that stays with you,” Amon said. “Every time you run an AI on the cloud, versus you running the computer that you have in your hand now, that’s your computer. It runs on that at no cost to you.”
Amon said Qualcomm wants its chips to enable all these experiences at the edge, or on-device. The AI revolution is the latest chapter in Qualcomm’s 40-year history of driving technological transformation, from pioneering mobile communications to integrating consumer electronics into smartphones, and now to enabling on-device AI processing.
“We are like a real technology company,” Amon stated. “We’re the No. 1 patent holder in the United States, we have created a lot of fundamental technologies.” He said Qualcomm technology is present in devices people use daily, even if they aren’t aware of it.
Photo credit: Deborah Yao
