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.
