Your smartphone is already pretty good at answering questions. The next step is getting it to actually do things for you.
That was one of the biggest themes I saw here in Maui at Qualcomm’s annual Snapdragon Summit. The company brought me to Hawaii to see its latest technology, including the new Snapdragon chips that will power the next generation of high-end smartphones.
Disclosure: Snapdragon covered my travel to attend Snapdragon Summit 2026. They had no editorial input or control over my coverage.
Snapdragon chips are already inside everything from Samsung Galaxy phones to smart glasses, computers and cars. The latest versions, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and Gen 6 Extreme, are designed to deliver better performance and battery life while handling more AI directly on the device.
I got to see some of those capabilities in action.
One demo helped people pose for better photos. Another automatically turned videos into a highlight reel without sending the footage to the cloud. There was even technology that could create a sort of virtual voice bubble around you, isolating your voice from the noise nearby.
But the bigger idea Qualcomm is pushing is something called “agentic AI.”
Instead of asking your phone to do one thing and getting one response, an AI agent could potentially understand what you want, figure out the steps involved and carry them out on your behalf.
Think of it as the difference between asking your phone for information about a restaurant and asking it to handle the steps involved in making dinner plans.
Of course, the more we allow AI to do for us, the more important privacy, trust and control become. Qualcomm says a key part of its approach is keeping the user in control and doing more processing directly on our devices instead of constantly sending information to the cloud.
My takeaway from the Summit is that AI on our gadgets still feels early. Some of the things it can do today aren’t necessarily faster than just doing them yourself. But the technology is getting quicker, more capable and increasingly connected across phones, computers and wearables.
If my phone eventually handles a few items on my to-do list all by itself, I’m not complaining.
