At COMPUTEX 2026’s first keynote, Qualcomm President and CEO Cristiano Amon outlined the company’s vision for agentic AI as an autonomous teammate integrated across devices. Amon delivered his keynote, titled “Year of the Agents,” on June 1 at 2:15pm at Nangang Exhibition Center Hall 2.
James C.F. Huang, Chairman of the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA), welcomed Amon back for the third consecutive year, emphasizing that he “has chosen COMPUETX as the stage to share Qualcomm’s vision with the world.”
The keynoted opened with a video highlighting how AI is transiting from a tool into a teammate that is always learning and always available. The AI agent anticipates user needs, providing seamless assistance across work, home and personal contexts. It is “computing that never misses a moment,” listening, hearing and seeing everything the user does.
Before diving into agentic AI, Amon emphasized that technological progress is driven by partnerships, thanking Qualcomm’s Taiwan-based partners and acknowledging collaboration across the semiconductor supply chain.
The focus of his presentation was to explain how AI is evolving across edge devices. He described a rapid shift in AI from prompt-based assistance to systems capable of autonomous action, becoming increasingly proactive, personalized and embedded in daily life.
Each device at the edge, including wearables, phones, PCs and cars, would be an endpoint for the AI agent, which would now be at the center of the digital experience, Amon said. This agent would be available at any device to help manage schedules, emails and daily tasks.
But current personal electronics were designed for user-initiated actions rather than persistent autonomous workloads. Having an AI agent constantly running creates power and latency challenges that require strong CPU, GPU and NPU systems to orchestrate tasks efficiently, Amon said.
Moving on from personal devices, Amon outlined how agentic AI would operate in cars and robotics. In cars, it would personalize the cockpit experience while integrating perception and driving systems, managing both user interaction and vehicle navigation. He described robotic systems as capable of “sensing, thinking and acting,” combining real-world perception with motion control and layered reasoning capabilities.
Amon continued to introduce 6G as the first generation of wireless designed for AI, integrating connectivity, computing and sensing. While wireless has always connected, it would now turn users into walking cameras, quickly uploading video to the cloud and continuously exchanging data between devices, he said.
Computing across wireless networks would enable continuous intelligence from personal devices to the cloud, Amon said. Through sensing, wireless networks would create a digital twin of the physical world that could identify objects and people, providing AI agents with real-time information, he said.
“Agents are defining the architecture and economics of AI,” Amon said. Agentic AI would greatly increase the demand for tokens, which he called “the currency of AI.” AI workflows would move from thousands to millions of tokens per task, he said, projecting a 40-fold increase in token consumption by 2030. But distributing workloads across cloud and edge could reduce costs and token usage while improving efficiency, he added.
To close out his keynote, Amon announced Qualcomm’s new data center product brand, “Dragonfly,” extending its compute portfolio from edge devices to infrastructure. He plugged the Qualcomm Investor Day coming up on June 24 in New York, where the company would announce more about data centers.
