Qualcomm (QCOM) CFO & COO on Snapdragon Chips, Agentic AI & Future Beyond AAPL

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

Qualcomm is kicking off its annual Snapdragon Summit as the company pushes further into AI, PCs, automotive and the data center. CFO and COO Akash Palkhiwala joins us from Maui to discuss the company's next phase of growth and what investors should be watching. Akash, we appreciate you taking the time away from the beautiful weather to be with us. I mean, you're coming to us right off the stage. Qualcomm framing this year around the concept of agentic AI, moving from apps to user intent. So, how does the agentic AI change the way consumers interact with their devices compared to the first wave of generative AI?

Akash Palkhiwala (0:40)

Yeah. So, Marley, first of all, thanks for having me on. It's great to be here on the show. The Snapdragon Summit is our annual celebration of new technologies that we bring to all Edge and Cloud devices. And so, we're showing off these new things. And one of the areas of focus for us in this conference is agentic AI. And as everyone knows well, we've gone through this model of where consumers used AI more in a question and answer format, similar to search in the past, where they would ask a question and get a response from the AI model.

And the next transition we think is going to be increasingly around agents and consumer interacting with agents, and then agents acting on behalf of the consumer. And it's a very different paradigm. I think AI is becoming a lot more capable. These agents can understand context around the consumer, understand information that the consumer has. And then a device like a phone would be able to give the location of the consumer, what the camera can see, what the audio can hear.

And all that context becomes a very important input in agents being able to figure out how to serve the purpose that the consumer is asking for. So we're going to bring that technology not just to phones, but to automotive, to industrial devices, to personal AI and wearable devices, and then finally to robotics and PC. So very excited. This is a horizontal technology, a pretty significant shift in the industry. And Qualcomm is really sitting at the crossroads of this transformation, and so excited to be a part of it, and excited to talk about it here at our event.

SPEAKER_1 (2:27)

And at the event, you've announced the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme and the Elite Gen 6 flagship mobile platforms. Why is it critical to launch two distinct flagship chipsets for this generation, and also what level of processing power was required to run these autonomous agents directly on device?

Akash Palkhiwala (2:46)

Yeah, so I think we've been seeing the expansion of the premium handset market, right? As the handset continues to be more and more important in every consumer's life, there is a lot more people buying more expensive handsets. And so the premium segment of phones, which is devices over $600, we're seeing that market expand globally, not just in developed markets, but even in emerging markets, we're seeing that trend.

And as a result, we thought, why not split our roadmap in that tier and deliver two chips, one that gives you the extreme high end of the performance. And so that is our Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme chip. And then Snapdragon 8 Elite, which is slightly lower tier than that, but still delivers incredible performance and improvements over what we had last year. So this is about leadership in the premium tier. Snapdragon has done it every year. And this is one more year where we're delivering an incredible product that across all the OEMs globally are deploying devices with. So pretty exciting time and you're looking, you should look forward to a lot of new devices coming in with these chips over the next several months.

SPEAKER_1 (4:01)

One of the things I thought was particularly exciting is part of Qualcomm's forecasting this acceleration and on-device AI capabilities as we head into 27 rather than seeing a plateau. So I am curious, what is giving you the confidence that consumers and developers are ready for that fast of an adoption cycle?

Akash Palkhiwala (4:19)

You know, it's just a, it's a technology that makes a lot of sense from a consumer perspective. This agentic AI transformation is at the center of it as we discussed earlier.

The amount of computing power and chip capabilities that's going to be required really gets transformed as you go from the previous model of consumers using AI to a agentic AI. And what we are delivering with these chips is this incremental capability that allows you to do that. And remember, what's one of the most important things in these devices, because they're all battery powered devices and battery life is very, very important. We're delivering these technologies at very high performance, at very low power, and that's foundational to how our customers differentiate their products in the market.