In a private meeting room in the depths of Qualcomm’s massive event stand, I attended a roundtable discussion hosted by Durga Malladi, the SVP and General Manager of Technology Planning and Edge Solutions at Qualcomm. He had a lot to talk about – Qualcomm has been at the forefront of on-device AI hardware for a while now, teaming up with Microsoft at Computex last year to deliver a new generation of Copilot+ AI PCs.
I’ll spare you the reams of business-focused use cases Malladi and the other Qualcomm staffers had to talk about, and get straight to the good stuff: the rise of so-called ‘AI agents ’.
AI in your pocket… and your laptop, and your car, and your house
For the uninitiated, ‘agentic’ AI (a term that seems to have mysteriously entered the tech industry parlance without any fanfare) refers to AI-powered natural language tools that essentially act as a sort of personal assistant – capable of carrying out a wide range of tasks that would normally require you to navigate through multiple apps or websites on your device.
‘Appless’ AI assistants like Rabbit and the ill-fated Humane AI pin have been floated before, with limited success. (Image credit: OpenAI / Rabbit / Humane)
One example Qualcomm gave was its Automotive AI suite (the Snapdragon Ride Elite and Snapdragon Cockpit Elite processors) – your car could soon be able to buy you concert tickets while it drives you to the venue, and then go park itself and pick you up afterward when you text your partner that you’re ready to leave the venue. All of this could stem from a straightforward verbal command.
Yes, this does mean that the AI agent has access to your banking details, and your geographical location data, and your message history, and… the list goes on. Malladi assured me that the agent’s processes are heavily encrypted and stored exclusively on local hardware, to the point where it would take an extremely driven individual to access it (much like your existing encrypted data). But it’s a fundamental operating requirement of AI agents to be able to see everything about you – and Qualcomm’s plan for making users a bit more comfortable with this idea might actually drive me in the opposite direction.
Digital doubles
Your personal AI agent, Malladi explains, is “the equivalent of your digital persona. It is you.” Now, I’m going to sidestep the fact that this is a bit frighteningly close to the plot of the Black Mirror episode ‘White Christmas’, and instead focus on the way we as real-world tech users will engage with such a feature. I’m sure I don’t speak for everyone here, but I don’t want an AI assistant who slowly starts to mimic and predict my actions with better and better accuracy. If anything, I’d be happier with an agent that offers a more distinct and unique personality.
That’s not the only issue I have with this whole process, though. Malladi explains that these agents – in your phone, in your laptop, in your car, and beyond – will be effectively able to replace the entire ecosystem of apps that modern devices have become entirely adapted to. “We’ve been living in this app-centric world for about fifteen years now,” he says. “These apps are silos by themselves”.
Is Google Maps really a tool that needs to be filtered through an AI agent? (Image credit: Future)
He’s not entirely wrong. I can see the appeal: instead of needing to open a maps app, and a restaurant review app, and a search engine, and so on, you can simply ask your AI agent to do all the work, and it’ll do it. “The agent is the first interface, and the only interface,” Malladi explains. “You’re never going to see the apps.”
Never? That feels a bit unlikely. For starters, some apps are borderline non-functional without a proper visual interface. Navigation tools like Google Maps and Waze can provide step-by-step directions that the agent feeds to you, sure, but I don’t know a single person who doesn’t also want the visual map open at the same time. My 24-hour gym requires me to bring up the app to get a QR code for access to the building – can the agent simply pluck that from the app, or do I still need to sign in normally?
The death of apps?
There are other problems with this ‘appless’ vision of the future of tech. The app ecosystem across both the Google Play Store and Apple ’s App Store has grown to monstrous proportions over the past decade; Malladi likens the arrival of AI agents to the shift from using websites to using apps, saying: “You can accomplish the same thing by going to a website, but in a dedicated app, the UI – the whole process – is streamlined. This is the next step in this process.”
But I think this is a significantly larger potential shift than that – and if the past is anything to go off, those sorts of massive changes to the established norms risk becoming a turn-off for potential consumers.
And what about free software that relies on in-app ad revenue to turn a profit? Under Qualcomm’s plan for agentic AI, developers of such tools could be cut straight out of the market – after all, nobody wants an AI helper that’s just going to feed them ads from other apps, and no rational advertiser is going to pay to have a bot sit patiently and watch a 30-second ad before proceeding (although it’s a rather amusing thought).
I’m still going to have a tonne of games on my phone, too – AI agents can’t replace that. (Image credit: Asus)
Still, Qualcomm is confident that AI agents will become commonplace in the future, even if such a change has to happen gradually. Malladi was keen to emphasize the advancements in both NPU hardware and LLM software that make this possible: just a few years ago, running such an advanced AI model on local hardware simply wasn’t feasible, but with more powerful processors and more efficient models, it’s now easy to install a pre-trained model on a device like a phone or tablet.
I’m reluctant to say outright that I’ll refuse to embrace AI agents if they do become widespread. As a tech journalist, it would be downright foolish of me to refuse to engage with new technologies just because I prefer things the way they are. But I definitely think that we’re a lot further away from universal adoption of agentic AI than Qualcomm would like to believe – although I have to commend the company for wanting to get ahead of the curve, because if this thing does blow up in popularity, Qualcomm will be front and center.
Oh, but promise me the voice commands thing won’t be mandatory, okay? I don’t want to shout at my phone in public .
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