Qualcomm President and CEO Cristiano Amon said artificial intelligence is entering what he called the “next chapter”, where AI agents, not apps, will become the centre of digital life. He also said 6G will bring AI directly into telecom networks, marking the next major shift in connectivity.

In a keynote address at the India AI Impact Summit, he argued that this will change the structure of the mobile ecosystem itself. “I think we look at our smartphones as an inseparable device in most of our digital life,” he said. “But now, that’s going to get replaced by an agent.”

“When that happens, that’s where the value is, because then the agent is free,” Amon continued. “It can go to the internet and do things, it can go to your phone and do things, and you’re no longer bound by constructs of your hardware or your apps in the application.”

He said that these agents will work across multiple devices, while fundamentally changing the human-computer interface. Rather than learning keyboards, touch gestures or menus, users will interact naturally through voice, vision and text, with devices capable of understanding what they see, hear and say.

Amon said the usefulness of these agents will depend on how well they understand personal context. “For them to be very useful, they needed to be contextually aware of what is relevant to you,” he said.

He added that the data generated by always-on devices could far exceed the publicly available internet data currently used to train AI models. “All this available data that is publicly on the internet that you train models on, it’s a fraction of the data that is going to be generated if you have, for example, a glass with a camera that sees everything that you see,” he said.

How 6G will be powered by AI

Turning to telecom infrastructure, Amon said 6G will be faster than speeds. “6G is going to provide an evolution of connectivity, faster speed, lower latency, and higher coverage. But that’s not the story,” he said. “The biggest part of 6G is AI, like I said before, is now going to come to the telecom network.”

He said future networks will not only connect devices but also sense the surrounding environment. “The network not only will provide connectivity between your device and the internet, but will sense everything that’s around you,” he said. “It’s going to be one of the biggest transitions I think we have, as big as going from voice to data.”

He argued that intelligence will be distributed across devices, networks and data centres. “You’re going to have now intelligence that’s going to be incredibly distributed across the cloud, across the near edge, the network in itself, and on device,” he said, adding that some tasks will require instant on-device response while others will rely on cloud-scale computing.

Amon said India is well-positioned in this transition. “One of the largest data consumptions per user in mobile devices in the world is in India. The whole internet is mobile,” he said.