AI agents will become "the new app," Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon told CNBC on Tuesday, as the chipmaker revealed it has over 40 devices in development designed for an agent-first world.
"The principle is something that you wear, something that is with you all the time, something that can see the world around you," Amon said on CNBC's "The Tech Download" podcast, describing a future where hardware is built around autonomous AI rather than app grids.
Those devices span categories far beyond phones. Amon listed jewelry, earbuds with cameras, pins, and watches as form factors Qualcomm is already powering.
"Right now. We have over 40 designs of those devices, and I'm telling you, the types of form factors are very, very broad," he said.
Apps are "not dead," Amon acknowledged, but he predicted they will fundamentally change as agent-driven interfaces replace tap-and-scroll navigation. He offered an example: an AI agent that instantly retrieves banking transaction details, eliminating the need to open an app and hunt through menus.
The bet extends Qualcomm's push into smart glasses, which Amon called a potential smartphone-scale opportunity. Shipments are already in the "order of multiple tens of millions" per year, he told CNBC, and could reach "hundreds of millions" within a couple of years, rivaling a smartphone market that shipped 1.26 billion units in 2025.
"We're looking at smart glasses that could eventually become as big as the smartphone," Amon said. The comments build on themes Amon laid out earlier this month at Computex in Taipei, where he declared that "2026 is the year of agents." In that keynote, he described a future where devices have "two personalities", one controlled by the user and another operated by AI agents working autonomously in the background.
The shift carries implications for Apple and Samsung, the dominant smartphone players that have built ecosystems around app stores and operating system lock-in. If agents become the primary interface, the competitive battleground moves from app ecosystems to on-device AI performance, a domain where Qualcomm's Snapdragon platform already competes on power efficiency and connectivity.
"The phone is around the agent," Amon said. "The new classes of devices are going to be around the agent as well. And the agent will be the one that will understand human intentions and will do things for you."
Amon also spoke at AWE 2026 in Long Beach on Tuesday, alongside Google and Snap executives, reinforcing Qualcomm's push into spatial computing and wearable form factors. The company is positioning its chips to handle AI workloads locally rather than relying on cloud processing, reducing latency for agent-driven tasks.
"All the devices that we wear become endpoints for agents, and those AI companies understand they have to win those endpoints from agents," Amon added.
