‘My AI agent should look very different from yours’ – Qualcomm SVP on why AI agents belong on devices, not the cloud

AI assistants need to run on devices so they can be personalised to their users and respond to our individual needs, a senior executive at Qualcomm has said.

Durga Malladi, SVP and general manager, technology planning and edge solutions at Qualcomm, said that customers are starting to demand responses which are tailored to their own lives and situations – and are unique to each user.

Currently, the best-known AI assistants – Alexa, Siri, or even ChatGPT – essentially offer the same interface and experience to every user. However, Durga (pictured above) told an audience at Collision in Toronto that this was starting to change.

“Increasingly, the answers to whatever you ask need to be far more personal and contextual in nature,” Darga said. “I don’t want a generic answer. I want an answer that makes sense to me. So my AI agent should look very different from yours.”

Durga said that these personalised agents will redefine the next generation of AI models. “We can call that ‘predictive computing’,” said Durga. “It’s anticipating, so that’s why it’s more pervasive and predictive computing. You want to have a more personalized AI experience.”

And Darga added that this need for personalisation would also move AI agents away from the cloud and onto devices – not least for privacy reasons: “We all might buy the same laptop, but over time, I want responses that are fine-tuned towards me, and you want a different kind of response for that…  you have to actually get additional context to what’s happening, which means you have local data, data that’s possibly very private, just for yourself. 

“In an enterprise setting, it could be a company confidential information. You don’t want that to be sitting somewhere else out there. So running it on-device makes sure that you have all sorts of privacy, user consent. Data remains on-device, never goes to the cloud.”

Durga also said that in-device AI can also help with “immediacy”, explaining: “You might or might not always have the best possible connectivity to the cloud. On-device AI helps you in terms of preserving that.”

Qualcomm has seen its share price soar this year amid growing market optimism about the company’s ability to succeed in the AI race, with Durga explaining the speed at which AI agents are developing more sophisticated ways of interacting with customers.  

“We have models that are becoming more and more sophisticated, but at the same time, there is an increasing use of all modalities at one go,” said Durga. “So when you have a voice assistant, it’s not just you treat voice separately and text in a different way and images in a different way, but in a multi-modality.”

Durga explained the context behind a recent demo of an AI assistant helping devise a recipe for a meal: “You take up your phone, you point towards a few vegetables on a kitchen table, and you say ‘create a recipe for me’. 

“The first thing that happens is that you have to figure out what is the question you’re asking? For a recipe. Second, you have to identify the vegetables on it – or it could be anything. And third, create a recipe based upon that. It’s a combination of image, voice and outcomes of a recipe, which is actually pretty generative. It’s a very intuitive way of dealing with devices.

Speaking the day after launching the first Qualcomm Snapdragon X Series laptops, Durga added: “We are redefining what a PC can do in a lot of instances. We are calling it ‘the rebirth of a PC in the context of an AI PC’.”  

Durga’s comments were made as part of a wider discussion on how on-device generative AI is revolutionizing devices, enabling faster, more efficient and highly personalized interactions at Collision, which is returning to Toronto for its sixth year. Global founders, CEOs, investors and media have come to the city to make deals and experience North America’s thriving tech ecosystem.

More than 1,600 startups will take part in Collision 2024 – the highest number of startups ever at a Collision event. 44 percent of these will be women-founded, and startups will travel to Toronto from countries including Nigeria, the Republic of Korea, Uruguay, Japan, Italy, Ghana, Pakistan and beyond.

In total, more than 800 speakers, 1,200 journalists, 850 investors and 100+ unicorn companies will arrive in Toronto from 140-plus countries, while 120+ trade delegations will participate in Collision to explore business opportunities with an international audience.

Partnerships at Collision have also grown 40% year-on-year, with nearly 250 global partners in 2022, including Snap, Google Cloud, TikTok, AWS, RBC, Siemens, KPMG, CAE, Interac and Crypto.com. Collision’s women in tech program is also sold out, as is our startup program.

The total floor space needed at the Enercare Centre has increased by 54%, from 50,000sqm to 77,000sqm.

Collision will be the largest international gathering hosted in the city of Toronto in more than two years, and is considered the single most important tech deal-making event in the world.

It may also be the largest gathering of tech unicorns at one event, ever. Deel, Canva, Trulioo and FalconX are among the more than 100 decacorns and unicorns that will be in attendance and on stage at Collision, in what Recode calls “one of the best shows for up-and-coming startups”. 

Top speakers at Collision include:

• Geoffrey Hinton, Godfather of AI
• Maria Sharapova, entrepreneur and tennis legend
• Aidan Gomez, founder and CEO of Cohere (an AI for enterprise and large language model company, which raised US$450 million at a US$5 billion valuation in June 2024)
• Raquel Urtasun, founder and CEO of Waabi (a Canadian autonomous trucking company)
• Jeff Shiner, CEO of 1Password
• Dali Rajic, president and COO of Wiz (a cloud security platform)
• Alex Israel, co-founder and CEO of Metropolis (an AI and computer vision platform)
• Jonathan Ross, founder and CEO of Groq (an AI chip startup)
• Keily Blair, CEO of OnlyFans
• Autumn Peltier, Indigenous rights activist

All of our summaries will be published on the Web Summit Summary Service page.

For any questions about this or any other Web Summit Summaries content, please contact us at media@websummit.com.

About Web Summit: 

Web Summit runs the world’s largest technology events, connecting people and ideas that change the world. Half a million people have attended Web Summit events – Web Summit in Europe, Web Summit Rio in South America, Collision in North America, Web Summit Qatar in the Middle East, and RISE in Asia – since the company’s beginnings as a 150-person conference in Dublin in 2009.

This year alone, Web Summit has hosted sold-out events in Qatar, which welcomed more than 15,000 attendees, and in Rio, where more than 34,000 people took part. Our events have been supported by partners including the Qatar Investment Authority, Snap, Deloitte, TikTok, Huawei, Microsoft, Shell, Palo Alto Networks, EY, Builder.ai and Qatar Airways. 

Web Summit’s mission is to enable the meaningful connections that change the world. Web Summit also undertakes a range of initiatives to support diversity, equality and inclusion across the tech worlds, including Impact, women in tech, Amplify, our scholarship program, and our community partnerships.

Useful links

• Collision website: https://collisionconf.com/ 
• Collision media kit: https://collisionconf.com/media/media-kit  
• Collision images: https://flickr.com/photos/collisionconf 
• About Web Summit: about.websummit.com