Qualcomm is flogging 6G as the network you will need once your gadgets start gossiping with AI assistants.
At Mobile World Congress, Qualcomm chief executive Cristiano Amon framed 6G as the backbone of an AI-driven “agent economy” where devices and assistants constantly communicate across the network.
Amon said: “AI will fundamentally change our mobile experiences. It’s going to change how we think about our smartphones. Think about our personal computing. Think about and interact with a car. The car is now a computing surface. If you actually believe in the AI revolution, 6G will be required. Resistance is futile.”
Qualcomm says early consumer testing could start around the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, with broader rollouts expected by 2029.
Fortune’s Kamal Ahmed says Qualcomm chief financial officer and chief operating officer Akash Palkhiwala walked him through a 6G future where people get real-time information via smart glasses.
Qualcomm chief financial officer and chief operating officer Akash Palkhiwala said: “6G is going to be the first time that connectivity and AI come together in the network. What we’re building is the first AI-native wireless network that’s ever been built,” after complimenting Ahmed on a watch that “only does one thing”.
He reckons the big change is that networks stop being tuned for humans’ doomscrolling and start being tuned for bots doing errands for other bots.
Palkhiwala said: “The traffic that we expect on 6G is way different from what we had before. Before, it was all about consumer traffic. We expect 6G to be driven by [AI] agent traffic. Think about all these use cases where there are AI agents sitting on various devices, your glasses, your watch, your phone, your PC. These agents will communicate with other agents and services across the network. “The traffic completely changes. 6G is being built with this idea that the traffic that goes on the network is not just going to be consumer voice calls or downloading videos; we’re going to have agents talking to each other, so the reliability of the network becomes very important.”
Qualcomm’s line is that on-device processing, edge computing, smarter bandwidth use through AI load control, and deeper cloud access will fuse into an “AI-native” wireless network, with the user experience meant to shift from app-hopping to a single assistant doing the lot.
Palkhiwala said: “Today we are in the application economy. In the future, you think of the app economy moving over to an agent economy, where there’s one agent I’m interacting with, and I can ask that agent to book me a movie ticket or a plane ticket, to order food for me, get an Uber for me. It knows everything about me.”
