India’s artificial intelligence (AI) opportunity lies less in building the biggest models, and more in deploying the technology at scale across its population and industries, Qualcomm President and Chief Executive Officer Cristiano Amon said, highlighting adoption as the country’s real competitive advantage.
"The real value is how quickly you can deploy this across industries? How many people can you reach with the technology?" he said.
Amon drew a parallel with India’s rapid smartphone and digital payments adoption, stating the country’s ability to leapfrog technological stages. He said AI could follow a similar trajectory but with a far larger impact on everyday life and productivity. "When I look at AI that's going to repeat itself in India, but it's going to be more powerful."
According to him, AI will go beyond internet connectivity by directly empowering users — changing how people access information, train themselves, receive feedback and learn new skills, while also creating an “economy of agents” around intelligent assistants.
He acknowledged that India entered the large language model race later and does not yet have comparable computing capacity to some global peers. However, he argued that talent and large-scale adoption can offset that gap if implementation is rapid across sectors.
Amon also outlined how devices will evolve in an AI-centric world. While the smartphone will remain important, it will increasingly act as a processing hub for a broader ecosystem of connected personal AI devices such as smart glasses and wearables.
"You carry the agent with you all the time, and the agent sees what you see, in case of glasses, hears what you hear. And workloads are going to shift from phones to those new devices."
He said the phone will continue performing its core functions but will also handle computing workloads for multiple connected devices, signalling a shift in how consumers interact with technology in the AI era.
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First Published: Feb 26, 2026, 17:24
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