Software that can act for a user,booking a cab, reserving a restaurant table, or similar tasks,has begun to appear in consumer products. Meta’s Muse Agent reached the top of Apple’s App Store within two weeks of launch, while Google’s Gemini assistant reported one billion monthly active users and a sevenfold increase in token usage year over year. These signals suggest AI agents may soon become routine tools for everyday tasks.
Durga Malladi, executive vice president and general manager of technology planning at Qualcomm Technologies, told Indian Express at the Snapdragon Summit in Maui that agentic AI is now a permanent feature of the market. He explained that users are moving from opening multiple apps to interacting directly with an agent that performs the work behind the scenes, reducing the need for explicit app navigation.
Enterprise deployments have already demonstrated the potential of AI agents, with companies using them for customer service, code generation, and data analysis. However, high costs and cybersecurity concerns have limited broader adoption. The recent consumer-focused successes of Muse and Gemini provide evidence that technology firms are preparing a shift from the app-centric model to one driven by conversational agents.
Meeting the computational demands of agentic AI will require new chip designs capable of handling personalized models that remember context, messages, and emails to build a private knowledge graph. Qualcomm’s launch of the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 chips signals that such hardware is being readied for widespread smartphone integration, extending capabilities that were previously limited to business users.
For consumers, granting an agent access to personal data such as email accounts or banking information raises trust questions. Qualcomm chief executive Cristiano Amon emphasized during his keynote that trust and convenience must be established before agents can act on a user’s behalf, and that security and privacy safeguards are essential while keeping final control in the user’s hands.
Malladi expects agents to grow in importance while apps continue to exist as a secondary option. He noted that AI already powers many everyday functions, such as image stabilization in photography, without users recognizing it. He predicts a future where agents operate invisibly, delivering convenience, usefulness, and productivity without the user needing to think about the underlying AI technology.