As artificial intelligence (AI) reshapes the connectivity market to become more aligned with tomorrow’s agentic-oriented business world, comms tech provider Qualcomm has set out its vision, emphasising the evolution from cloud-based AI to edge AI, enhancing performance, user experience and privacy.
Kicking off the company’s presence at MWC 2026, Enrico Salvatori, senior vice-president and president of Qualcomm Europe, said the company would move throughout 2026 by advancing AI models with reduced parameters – particularly in smartphones, wearables and PCs – and launching a new generation of the Snapdragon 8 elite platform featuring a 37% faster neural processing unit (NPU).
He added that Qualcomm’s hybrid AI architectures would see use in future 6G infrastructures and datacentres, with the aim of integrating cloud and edge AI “seamlessly”. Central to the company’s strategy would be to highlight the importance of execution alongside “visionary” goals, maintaining and extending partnerships with companies that have launched commercial devices using Qualcomm technologies, such as Samsung, Honor and Lenovo.
The point, said Salvatori, was executing on plans introduced in 2025. “The opportunity is to have more devices that are smart, adopting AI and [highlighting] the evolution of the original cloud AI with complementary support happening at the edge,” he said. “We are able to grow the performance of platforms. Two things are converging: from one side, AI models are working with better performance [with a] reduced number of parameters, [and] at the edge, you can see more and more inference happening … that is part of the overall architecture of [new] AI, that we call hybrid AI.”
One key area in which hybrid was being introduced rapidly was with smartphones, where user experiences in particular have evolved by introducing agentic AI. “We are moving from the original application-centric use of the smartphone to agentic AI,” said Salvatori. “The agent is interfacing with all the apps on the device so you don’t have to enter what you want to do … automatically, the device knows what you want to do. This is not talking about the future. This is what is happening today.” And there was a generality to this – hybrid would extend across the product lines and industry services where, he said, “AI is the new UI [user interface]”.
Specific technology announcements included expanded efforts to move from 5G Advanced to AI-native 6G – revealing that in this area, pre-commercial work is expected in 2028 to coincide with the Los Angeles Olympics, with commercialisation targeted from 2029. It also unveiled AI-driven RAN automation and commercial RAN AI features; a new Wi‑Fi 8 portfolio spanning client and networking infrastructure, a Snapdragon Wear Elite platform for on-device “personal AI” wearables; an X105 5G Advanced Modem‑RF positioned as the first Release 19-ready modem-RF system; and an on-premise industrial AI and private 5G autonomous factory demo with Siemens.
Looking at 6G, the conference saw Qualcomm state 6G was being designed as an AI-native system that builds on three key pillars: connectivity, wide-area sensing, and high-performance compute. These next-generation networks are said to feature new and advanced capabilities, including intelligent radios with integrated wide-area sensing capabilities, virtualised and cloud RAN with high-performance and energy-efficient compute, AI-based network autonomy, and edge and centralised datacentres for entirely new AI workloads.
Generational opportunity
Qualcomm saw 6G as a generational opportunity for the transformation and growth of the telecom sector, enabled by the combination of wireless, efficient computing and AI. 6G systems would support higher levels of efficiency and performance for telecommunication applications, new agentic consumer and enterprise devices, and new classes of AI-enabled services. These were said to range from context-relevant data, low-altitude aerial and terrestrial traffic management, data insights, and analytics at scale.
The company also outlined the partner ecosystem that it was working with. These include firms such as Airtel, Amazon, Asus, BT Group, Cisco, Dell, e&, Ericsson, FPT Corporation, Fujitsu/1finity, Google, HP, HPE, Humain, KDDI, KT, Lenovo, LG Electronics, LG Uplus, Meta, Microsoft, Motorola, NEC Corporation, Nokia, NTT Docomo, Reliance Jio, Samsung Electronics, Sharp, Siemens, SK Telecom, Snap Inc, Stellantis, Swisscom, Tejas Networks, Telstra, TIM Group, T-Mobile, Viettel Group, VNG and YTL.
Ericsson has been a key partner for Qualcomm on developing technology for every mobile generation, and at the Qualcomm MWC event, Marie Hogan, the comms tech provider’s head of 6G portfolio strategy, operations and technology portfolio, business area networks took a step back from mobile generations and looked at the demands on modern networks – in particular, what she said was the “dramatic rise” of AI over the past few years.
“We’re moving from having just centralised AI models and datacentres to seeing distributed, autonomous agents, in devices, in cars, in wearables, in humanoid robots,” said Hogan. “And this means a dramatic impact to our mobile networks. In fact, with the rise of AI agents and intelligent AI-native devices, that places a lot of requirements on the mobile infrastructure that we build. It’s not enough just to add more compute. We need more advanced networks. We need to add more uplink, a lot more uplink. Since 2G, we optimised for downlink, especially for latency and performance. Now, we need to look at other aspects.
“We [now] need to connect, smart devices; smart wearables,” she said. “We need to connect vehicles. We need to connect hundreds of millions of homes and enterprises and billions of devices and sensors. We are starting to add intelligence to selected functions in the networks, for example, for autonomy in certain cases, for optimisation of performance in certain use cases. And this is a stepping stone towards the fully capable AI networks that we see when it comes to 6G. With native 6G, as we’re starting to call it, AI will be built as a fundamental principle of the network.”
In a practical sense, this will see Ericsson construct, for the first time, AI embedded in every layer of the network, from the physical portion, to autonomous control, up to service orchestration. That is creating a network architecture that can bring together compute, connectivity and sensing. Hogan said the task of Ericsson, working with Qualcomm, would be to build an architecture that is both intelligent and “enabling the fabric of the world around it”.
The other key new-era comms technology launch centred around Wi-Fi 8. Qualcomm unveiled at MWC an AI-native Wi‑Fi 8 Portfolio that it said would unify client and network connectivity for AI-era performance. The FastConnect 8800 Mobile Connectivity System offers Wi-Fi 8, Bluetooth, Ultra Wideband 802.15.4ab and Thread in a single chip package.
It is claimed to be the world’s first Wi-Fi 8 service with a 4×4 Wi-Fi radio configuration, enabling speeds beyond 10 Gbps, up to twice the performance of the company’s previous Wi-Fi 7 generation and up to three times the gigabit wireless range. In addition, through Bluetooth High Data Throughput, top Bluetooth transmission speeds have increased from 2Mbps to 7.5Mbps.
The range is intended to see use in smartphones, tablets, laptops, robotics and other connected equipment. All offerings in the Qualcomm Wi-Fi 8 portfolio are sampling immediately, with commercial products expected in late 2026.
Outlining his company’s plans for the wireless standard to Computer Weekly, Ganesh Swaminathan, Qualcomm vice-president and general manager of wireless infrastructure and networking, predicted that likely enterprise use cases would be built on multiple access points (APs) and roaming, as well as what he described as “critical features” such as dynamic bandwidth expansion.
“In the enterprise, if you have multiple APs in a floor, and oftentimes [for example] during an event, clients are specifically located or connect to a particular AP while other APs are not loaded heavily,” he said. “So, what happens is every AP is trying to blast for the same bandwidth, and they’re trying to take the same amount of time. What Wi-Fi 8 brings to the table is dynamic bandwidth expansion, which means that wherever the client workload is, that AP can maximise the bandwidth while the other APs can be coordinated to manage the lesser bandwidth. You basically put bandwidth where it’s needed and you can manage it across the spectrum.”
