Building Trusted AI at Scale Cities Startups & Digital Sovereignty – Keynote Cristiano Amon

That was really an interesting session by CEO Cisco, highlighting the agentic AI, the role of agentic AI, as well as the physical AI and the current scenario. And also the last line was really an assuring line saying that the future will not be built by AI, but by humans who can confidently put AI to use. Well, ladies and gentlemen, moving on. Now it’s my honor to introduce a leader who’s been at the forefront of shaping the future of wireless technology and intelligent computing. Mr. Cristiano Amon is the president and chief executive officer of Qualcomm, a company that has defined and continues to redefine the global compute connectivity and AI landscape. And well, AI doesn’t just live in the cloud, it runs in your pocket, in your car, in the factory floors.

And Mr. Amon is leading Qualcomm’s push to bring powerful AI processing to the edge. enabling billions of devices to think locally and act intelligently. Ladies and gentlemen, it’s my pleasure to invite Mr. Amon, President and CEO of Qualcomm, to the stage. Please give a round of applause.

Good afternoon, everyone. Very, very happy and privileged to be here. I’m incredibly excited and energized about what’s happening here in India with AI and I think what’s happening with AI in general. What I’d like to talk to you today is about the next chapter of AI. And this is something that’s very near and dear to Qualcomm. We’ve been talking about this because I think we’re really entering now the next phase of AI. As AI gets developed, it’s going to be part of everything that we do. And especially… the interaction that we have with computers and with digital… So intelligent is now shifting for something that we kind of started and we all experience going to, you know, a chat box and asking questions into something that is going to be all around us and everywhere all the time, especially with the devices.

I actually love the presentation right before from my friend Jitu from Cisco when he talked about the traffic change from chat box to agents. And this is important. You know, I’ve been often talking about this, how we should be thinking about AI in a much broader sense. And it’s easier for a company like Qualcomm to talk about this because we build a lot of the chips that go into devices where the humans are. So as you create AI in the data center and you train and create those models, all this data. And you deploy this, you’re starting to see that this gets utilized in different ways. One fundamental thing that AI is doing for us.

it is changing the human computer interface because we don’t have to now learn how to use a computer if you know i’ve been uh often talking about this in different presentations we learn how to use an s2 keyboard and we still use that on a laptop then we use like to touch a screen but now the ai understands what we see what we hear what we say what we write so in itself it’s changing computers it’s changing the devices we interact with and uh it’s becoming a pervasive technology that is going to be everywhere and i think that’s the mission i think of qualcomm when i think about uh what we’re going to do is the same way that what we did with mobile communications and the creation of of the computer that fits in the palm of your hand is the ability to take that intelligence everywhere so we’re going to be creating a number of important shifts in the industry and i want to start talking about the mobile industry we may have had the privilege as a company to be part of every single transition of wireless technologies and let’s talk today I’m going to talk about the next one that is coming as well and what we saw with the transition of wireless technology that fundamentally at every generation of wireless you saw big shifts not only in devices and companies and because of the transition especially for example when you went to the ability to have a phone that you carry with you all the way to connect the phone or the internet all of a sudden that phone became a computer and it started to drive the future of the internet like a country like India that leapfrogged I think the internet and went straight to the mobile internet and that’s going to be true again when you think about AI for example in the mobile ecosystem AI is constantly changing and it’s changing and it’s changing and it’s changing and it’s changing going to fundamentally change how we think about the mobile device All of you today, and me included, I think we look at our smartphone, our inseparable device, most of our digital life is.

And the smartphone today is at the center of everything that we do. But now that’s going to get replaced by an agent. Now, when you think about the entire value chain that got created, for example, for the mobile industry, there’s an enormous amount of value on things like OSs and application stores. And that becomes like the platform when you’re going to develop an application that you’re going to do different things into the platform. An agent that now understands human intentions because, you know, you just need to tell him what you want. Or he’s going to see what you see and make a decision for you, assuming you will authorize it. it. When that happens, that’s where the value is because then the agent is free.

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. So as a result, we expect the AI is going to have a fundamental shift in the mobile industry where the agent is going to be at the very center. And as the agent is at the very center, everything surrounds the agent. You can access the agent from your mobile phone, but you can also access the agent from your glasses or for a pendant or for anything that you wear. And I think we’re going to look at the mobile ecosystem right now, not only as a single device experience, but you’re going to connect to agents across multiple types of devices.

And I think that’s incredibly exciting. And that’s not only unique to what you’re going to see in consumers. That’s going to happen also with things, because you can also have create AI that’s going to get trained on different things. on physical signals, like physical AI, on sensor data, and you’re going to deploy that in every computer. So what’s exciting about AI, it’s going to very quickly evolve for something you go to a browser and you ask a question. And I think, as my colleague from Cisco said, it’s got train and all the public available data on the Internet. You’re now going to go to a different type of AI experience that’s going to be the fundamental software that is going to run in all the devices around us and how you’re going to have interaction with the devices.

So I also want to basically, you know, as we think about this future, I just want to give you an example. What we saw across the industry is workloads or use cases have shifted. Devices didn’t go anywhere, but their workloads shifted. We used to do a lot of things in the early days of the Internet on your laptop. And forget. For example, e -commerce, you will do it on your laptop. Now, most of the e -commerce in the world is done on a phone. Tomorrow, or it could be like as early as, you know, within the end of this year, as you start to see the proliferation of glasses. If you have a glass that has agents, is connected to the Internet, has camera on those smart glasses, the glass see what you see.

You can just look at something and say, I’d like to buy this. What is, you know, can you check this? For example, check this on Flipkart. Just buy it for me. I’d like to buy this. Integration of payment system. You got a bill, say, pay this, notify me when I’m done, and so forth. So I think we’re going to see this fundamental change of devices. But that’s also going to be true about the revolution that’s happening in robotics and the revolution that exactly happened on industrials. So that’s an incredible opportunity. And we have been incredible. Incredibly focused as a company to basically drive that future of computing. There’s also a big debate, which I believe is the wrong way to look into that, which is about cloud and edge.

There’s a lot of debate about, oh, this is going to be running on the cloud. This is going to be running on the edge. And actually, it does not matter. Think about your device today. Your smartphone today has incredible amount of processing power, and there’s a number of different things that run in your smartphone. If you put it on airplane mode, you probably don’t use it. You just put it back and wait until you get connectivity again. It’s the most cloud -connected device because those things work as a one. And 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, in and on device.

And it’s all going to work similar. There are going to be things that you’re going to be able to do on the device because they’re… They require an instant response or require unique context, unique information that is relevant to you. Something is going to do on the cloud and they’re both going to be growing and it’s going to be transforming how we think about computers. So I like to provide the simple, I think, a description. Let’s say we are all using agents and you’re going to pick the agents that you like and the agents to be useful. It needs to be fast. It needs to be relevant for you. Let’s say, go back to the example I provided on the glasses.

And you have those smart glasses and you’re walking around and you have a camera. Then all of a sudden you see somebody and you ask this glass, like it’s your friend next to you and say, who is this person? And you want to get a response. This is so and so. Or you’re going to say, can you translate this for me? What is this? Can you pay this for me? You want to, this thing has to be similar. Similar is no friction. So certain things are going to be done on your device and the thing’s going to be on the cloud. It’s going to be completely transparent to you. But the interesting thing is those agents, for them to be very useful, they needed to be contextually aware of what is relevant to you.

So over time, the agent I’m going to be using, the agent you’re going to be using, they need to be relevant to me. So you’re going to have a lot of things that are going to be being processed and understood about you. So much so that I believe that in the end game, I think it was said in the prior presentation from Cisco that all this available data that is publicly on the Internet that you train models, it’s a fraction of the data that is going to be generated. If you have, for example, a glass of a camera that sees everything that you see, try to annotate the image, get information about the image and the context, reads what you read.

And so forth, that is an incredible amount of data, and that’s going to be providing a lot of important context for those models that are going to be relevant to you. That is the future, and it’s an incredible transformation. It’s going to transform every industry. No industry is immune to this. And I think what we’re doing at Qualcomm is really creating the future hardware and software that will help enable this future across all the devices. We’re a very unique semiconductor company. I think we’re probably one of the few companies that can be working on chips from sub -2 milliwatts to a smart earbud that you’re going to wear all the way to now 2 ,000 watts per chip on the data center.

But I think that’s the incredible future that AI is going to transform every single computer. And the agents are going to be at the center of the experience. It’s going to replace a lot of the OSs and applications. And that is the new future of technology, including the future of mobility. And that’s why we’re incredibly excited about this. And with that, I want to talk about something that is happening, which is about the next generation of wireless technologies. I would like to provide an example from the past. When you think about telecom networks, and I think we’re probably one of the, you know, American telecom companies that really focus on the evolution of cellular technology.

When you think about the evolution of this sector, when this all started, it was about providing a telephone. I think all of us was an incredible thing. You have a twisted copper pair to get to your home. You pick up. You get a dial tone. You dial. And eventually, you could dial. Anybody in the world of a telephone. Even how cellular started was about making sure all of us had the ability to carry a telephone. That was 2G, that you can call everyone. That’s different today. Now you have a very high performance broadband network for data. Voice is just one application in the many applications that you do with the network. It fundamentally changed the nature of the infrastructure.

The equipment was different. The use case is different. We’re heading to the next big transformation of the telecom sector. So 6G is going to provide an evolution of connectivity, faster speed, lower latency, higher coverage. But that’s not the story. That’s just a piece of the story. It’s just continue to improve the connectivity. The biggest part of 6G is AI, like I said before, is now going to come to the telecom network. And that becomes a large scale. 6G. AI network that is processing and get trained on all of the signals that happens at the network and providing new capabilities. One of the biggest features of 6G is the network, is the sensing network at scale.

I’m going to give an example. The network not only will provide a connectivity between your device and the Internet, but will sense everything that’s around you. We’ll use techniques that you see today in autonomous driving cars, like radars, as an example, to detect your environment. It’s going to provide a map of everything that is happening at scale. And you’re going to have completely different type of services for different industries. It will provide context for your agents. Very important. And the network will have that role. It will provide traffic management systems and some of the use cases that are going to be part of full self -driving cars. It will do drone detection and manage the traffic control.

Off the economy, there’s going to be an aerial in the wide area network and much more. because AI is also going to the network. It’s going to be one of the biggest transitions I think we have, as big as going from voice to data, and it’s all going to be part of this future of AI. And I just want to now make another parallel, I think, to the presentation from my colleague from Cisco. It puts a fine point on the network that needs to be built, the capability of the infrastructure, the security and trust, but that is an incredible future with technology. And as I get to the end of the presentation, I want to highlight that India has an incredible opportunity with this transformation.

We have seen that those big shifts in technology creates opportunity, change players. It changed, I think, the role of different countries as they provide globally. It’s a global scale for the technology, and that’s an incredible opportunity for India. I look of what happened in mobile in India, and one of the largest data consumption per user in mobile devices in the world is in India. The whole Internet is mobile. When you think about the potential and all of the things that I just discussed about how AI is going to change everything, creates new device, new experiences, new services, that becomes a massive opportunity. And when I look at the ambitions that were set by the AI Summit, I’m going to provide just some examples.

Those are just examples. It can be very broader, but I just want to connect with some of the ambitions of the Summit. There is a process of jumping into a large -scale industrialization. India is becoming a global manufacturing hub as well. And with AI, you… You go from the very beginning. with smart manufacturing and automation with incredible change that is happening in this sector enabled by those technologies. Same thing with smart cities, the ability to continue to evolve the infrastructure, the ability to use AI to increase the scale, the reach, the access for healthcare. How you change education. Those are incredibly powerful learning tools. The ability to actually use some of those technologies to empower people with information and you’re going to have an ongoing learning experience.

Think about those agents with you all the time answering questions, telling you how to do things, especially when you think of context, for example, of those new devices such as smart glasses. And it can fundamentally change industries, for example, such as agriculture. Right. Right. Right. Just a few examples of the potential of connecting this technology with everything, I think, that is going on in India. It’s an incredible and exciting future enabled by AI. And really, it’s about meeting the ambition of democratizing this technology for everyone and actually have an important role in increasing the global welfare. And, you know, as a company that has always been focused on enabling our partners and other industries to innovate, I think the history of Qualcomm, we never believe is the job of one company to be responsible for all the innovation.

It’s really to enable many industries and partner. We’re incredibly excited to play a very small part on this mission. Thank you very much for the opportunity to talk with all of you and