Qualcomm Bets on 'Personal AI' as Terminal Market Growth Shifts from Specs to Agents

The global smart terminal market is undergoing a structural realignment. Smartphone shipments fell 13.9% year-over-year in the first half of this year, yet AI-capable phones now account for 66.4% of shipments, up 21.8%. PCs and tablets show the same pattern. Behind this contradiction, Qualcomm sees a new growth logic.

Qualcomm commissioned IDC to produce a white paper titled "From AI Devices to Personal AI — Agent-Driven Terminal Evolution and Industry Restructuring," proposing a paradigm shift toward "Personal AI." The paper argues that the old strategy of stacking hardware specs for sales no longer works, as display refresh rates, megapixel counts, and benchmark scores are losing their appeal to consumers.

The white paper defines Personal AI as a personal intelligent system with AI agents as the core operating carrier centered around the user. Phones, PCs, and glasses share the same understanding of the user, remembering preferences and sensing the environment.

Three bottlenecks block this vision: cost, experience, and privacy. From conversational AI to reasoning AI to agent AI, token consumption per task has grown roughly 100x. Relying entirely on the cloud causes exponentially rising inference costs, network latency destroys real-time awareness, and continuously collected personal data creates severe privacy exposure risks.

Qualcomm's solution is distributed end-edge-cloud computing, breaking physical boundaries between devices, edge nodes, and the cloud. High-frequency lightweight tasks stay on-device, medium-complexity tasks go to edge nodes, and complex inference calls the cloud as needed.

Qualcomm product expert Zhu Yuankun said the core carrier of Personal AI doesn't have to be a single hardware form factor. In Qualcomm's architecture, on-device personal knowledge graphs record preferences without data leaving the device; a sensor hub enables around-the-clock sensing at tens of milliwatts; and CPU, NPU, GPU, and sensor hub each handle their specialized roles.

Qualcomm argues the real bottleneck isn't compute power but sustained service capability, multi-task parallelism, and battery life. Devices must keep AI agents online around the clock while handling multiple simultaneous tasks without draining the battery.

IDC data shows AI is the only remaining growth driver in this cycle. Qualcomm's strategic bet: terminal makers shouldn't pick a winning hardware form factor, but enable AI to flow seamlessly across phones, PCs, and glasses — it's not a multiple-choice question.