Qualcomm’s chief executive thinks the app as you know it is on the way out, and that the phone in your pocket is about to lose its place at the centre of your digital life.
‘Agents are going to be the new app,’ Cristiano Amon told CNBC’s The Tech Download podcast. Apps are ‘not dead,’ he said, ‘but apps are going to change.’
The argument is that AI agents which act on your behalf, pulling a bank balance, rescheduling a meeting, paying a bill from a QR code, become the thing people deal with, while apps turn into services those agents quietly call on. Amon called 2026 ‘the year of agents’ and predicted every operating-system vendor will build an agent orchestrator into its software within months.
40 new devices, and glasses to rival the phone
To match the shift, Qualcomm is working on more than 40 designs for new AI devices, Amon said, in form factors he called ‘very, very broad’: jewellery, earbuds with cameras, pins, pendants and watches.
The common thread is something you wear that can see and hear the world and feed an agent context. The smartphone sticks around, he said, but as one planet orbiting the agent rather than the sun everything revolves around.
He is most bullish on smart glasses. Shipments already run to ‘multiple tens of millions’ a year, Amon said, and within ‘a couple of years’ could reach ‘hundreds of millions’ and rival the roughly 1.2 billion smartphones shipped annually.
Why AI firms are suddenly building hardware
That, Amon argued, is why non-traditional players are piling into gadgets. OpenAI, already working with Qualcomm on an agent-first phone, bought Jony Ive’s hardware startup io for $6.4bn last year. Whoever owns the device that talks to the agent owns the ‘endpoint’.
There is also a data prize. The video and audio an always-on wearable captures is ‘exponentially larger’ than the data used to train today’s models, Amon said, and AI firms want it to build more bespoke services. That is also the privacy question the industry keeps dodging, the kind already circling tools that quietly capture everything on your screen.
It threatens Apple’s playbook, too. When the phone is the centre, one company can own the phone and its accessories; when the agent is the centre, Amon said, the market opens into a ‘horizontal’ free-for-all, awkward for Apple’s tightly integrated model.
A memory crunch in the way
The catch is supply. Amon was blunt about the memory shortage squeezing the industry: ‘If you have some memory, I’ll buy it from you.’ He likened it to the pandemic, when demand outran supply, and said capacity may not catch up until the second half of 2027, with some pointing to 2028.
The vision lands as Qualcomm pushes past phones. It is reportedly in talks to buy the RISC-V AI-chip startup Tenstorrent, founded by the veteran designer Jim Keller, for $8bn to $10bn, a deal that would carry it into data-centre chips, and it unveils its own data-centre roadmap on 24 June. Qualcomm shares rose about 5 per cent on the Tenstorrent report.
Whether agents really do dethrone the app is unproven, and a chief executive whose silicon would power all these devices has every reason to say they will. But the direction, from screens you tap to assistants you talk to, is one the whole industry now seems to be betting on.
