Change is certain. What we become next, maybe that's something we get to choose. I love that your mind, like, we're here, but you're already thinking three steps ahead of where it goes. So that's how we get to the next idea before we even get to the current idea. I can't help it. I love it. Their Snapdragon chips began revolutionizing mobile technology way back in 2007.But for most of us, Q Qualcomm is invisible. It exists somewhere inside our phones, doing the complicated thing it does while we scroll, text, and complain about our battery life. But Q Qualcomm CEO Christiane Aman is betting his company's next stack is much bigger than the phone. Cars, robots, AI data centers, 6G.It's a pretty significant reinvention for a company this size. I've been around all different types of industries and seen companies change on a global scale, but I wanted to share my inside access and show you what a transformation like this actually looks like up close and from the inside. The future of leadership is. I'm Ryan Patel. This is how they run.Ryan, did you

call an Uber?

Come on in. Let's go.Thank you for picking

this is my 1973 Bronco.

I'd come to San Diego to talk about the future of computing, but naturally, we ended up starting in a car that was older than I am. I had heard that you had a hobby of this.

I do a little bit. I kind of think about what I want and I, I go to the shop. I, you know, make decisions with them, and I make a bunch of changes, change the transmission, change a couple of things in the interior, change things on the engines.So this is a whole new engine. This is a, this is the same engine that is in the Mustang GT, I think is the Ford Coyote 5 L. It's a good ride for San Diego. So

can I ask you, you chose a color scheme.

Yeah, this is one of the original colors they had.

It's

called

is the

Foxwood Green, and it has the Ranger edition that has the white stripes. Got you, and the white wheels, but it's completely restored, and you've got some others too. I do. I always like cars and, uh, and I.I really like the cars from the 70s, so I decided that's my midlife crisis.

If there is a trait that you would say that other people should be thinking about or do or that you do, what would, what would that be?

I was very optimistic and for a very simple reason, uh, it's better than the alternative. Today it's a very unique environment because semiconductor really became also a geopolitical industry. Like when I came out of engineering school, I thought.I never thought I'd be CEO of this company, much less indeed in some of the rooms in the Trump Xi meeting in China, and you know, CEOO job can be a stressful job, and, uh, and sometimes uh it is a lonely job, but I try not to make it a lonely job.That's right now they're stressed over.

Youmentioned the word lonely as many CEOs and leaders who are leading companies, you're leading one of the top tech companies in the world when things get a little bit harder, what is it that you do distress?

Time with my family. Like I go home, like I, I don't, I don't bring the work problems home, and I, I think just time with the people, you know, you love and love you.Um, the other thing is people say positive energy is contagious and it's, it's the same thing I told you before. What's the alternative, negative energy? So that's not a good choice.Maybe there's one thing that has to do with my culture. Look, I've been born and raised in Brazil, I went to school in Brazil, and I often say Brazil is not for beginners. And, uh, and if you're used to deal with adversity and change,

that'shelpful. Cristiano's optimism isn't just personality. Sure, he smiles, he jokes, and he even says he doesn't stress.But what I really wanted to see was how his positivity impacts the business he runs, so we headed back to Q Qualcomm's campus to get a glimpse of the day to day. So you're gonna, you're allowing me to be in your all hands meeting as an honorary Q Qualcomm employee. Yes,

but please don't ask too hard questions, OK.

I can't promise you that because you got everybody. OK, medium. For the next 30 minutes, Cristiano answered every single question thrown his way. His team asked about the pivot, shareholder pressure, and how to find focus when everything is changing. But of course, as an honorary employee, I felt compelled to ask how on earth are they going to pull this off.

You can say the company is too big to execute on all of this. It's gonna take time, it's gonna be processed, it's gonna be bureaucratic. The other thing is, no. That means we have a lot of resources, we can divide ourselves into smaller uh qualcomms like we had in the past. And it is possible. We've done it before. It's hard, it's too much. We have a lot to do. We just keep going because believing in ourselves is exactly 50% of the problem, and I think that's what we need to do across thecountry.

The interesting part was, nobody in the room seemed entirely convinced by default. They wanted to know if these bets were gonna pay off, whether Q Qualcomm could actually do all of this at once.And Cristiano seemed to prefer it that way.

It's very personal to me and I think my connection with the company. Like I joined the company as an engineer in 1995. So I feel like I'm not, I'm the CEO but I'm just one of them. Like we're on the same team.

Do youfeel where the company is going forward has drastically changed since you've started here?

Yes, absolutely. The company always reinvent itself, so there's something.Some excitement about something completely new that we're going to do. Like if you look where we started, we started as a licensing company, something never been done before, this magnitude. Then we became a semiconductor company. We didn't expect to be that big. And then we went from everything wireless from cellular to Wi Fi to Bluetooth, everything, radio. Then we became in the smartphone era, realizingA computing company and all of a sudden we're doing processor for smartphones. Now we enter a completely new market and now we're going to AI data centers. So if you actually look over the horizon, it's transformation after transformation aftertransformation.

So by this point we talked so much about reinvention, but I was ready to see what they're actually betting on. Oh wow.This is,

this, yeah, there are a couple of things, you know, we do tests here, but you also can bring, uh, infrastructure. Some of those things you see in the floor is like for RF.

This looks like out of the future. Am I wrong? For

companies that deal with radio frequency communications, you use this to do a lot of the texts about radio propagation. So we do that. Some of the things you're probably seeing here is things associated with some of our 6G, uh, development. So actually that's the.Uh, the team that is, that is working on the 6G, yes, I can't tell you how many people are interested in this drone detecting technology. You just read the news, you, you see it, but this is, uh, this is awesome. 6G is gonna be a big change in the industry because in addition of communications, in addition of, of the connectivity, I think for the age of AI, in addition of enabling all of us to be walking cameras with glasses to see what I see, sending high definition video to the cloud, the other thing is.Every radio connection, there's something in 6G called an ISAC, an integrated sensing and connectivity. So every radio connection works as a radar, and you can see it can be used for many things including drone detection. The network can see everything that moves, everything that flies. I,

this is, this is pretty, I mean, seeing it in person, I'm speechless.

Yeah, so

this is the inside.

6G will be able to.Be a very important, I think, a part of, uh, globally national security, the ability to detect drones. You're gonna have to have AI models. They are gonna be trained on the propagation aspects of radio frequency. This is not language. This is something different. It's called physical AI, and you got to run those models at the radio base stations. So there's a lot of R&D that is happening right now for 6G that's coming in by 2029.One thing I can say about the company, uh, you know, humility, Quocom understand radio communications, and I think we're gonna do a good job at this. Uh, it's great.

And when I hear you're passionate about the, the details about, you know, engineering background and sometimes you have to stop from trying to do things.

So it's a little bit of gut feeling as a CEO. Sometimes if you started to do things yourself, you become the bottleneck, but then sometimes you look at something and you say this is so obvious. I need to help them. I'm just going to stop what I'm doing. I'm gonna do it myself. Yeah, I have those moments and uh.It's uh, it's, it's part of being in the company for a long time, part of knowing the people across different organizations, knowing the technology, and then I can't help it.

I love it. Q Qualcomm was building in a bunch of innovative directions, and it was cool to see firsthand how often one idea seemed to bleed into another, how one solution could unexpectedly carve a path to solving something else entirely.

But the thingabout robots, it combines everything we did in auto, everything you do in phones from automotive, the safety.The very robust, you know, high-intensity processing edge AI. Think about the nervous system of the robot. Think about the motion control. But then, you need to bring the high level of integration that you have in the mobile industry, perception, support for vision, integration of camera and sensors, and more important, battery life. If you want a $20,000 robot to cost $5000 you need to be able to integrate everything.

In a place like this, the future can look pretty unfinished, but maybe that's the point. Nothing here is finished yet.You have to look at all of this and imagine what it might become.

I know it's a lab. It's a, it's a lab, but if you can see through the lab, what you see is a retail store. You see like a supermarket. You see it. You have shelves and everything. So we've been talking about digital transformation of enterprise, and most of that was again enterprise data moved to the cloud. But the reality is when you think about connectivity computing and AI at the edge, you can transform how the entire company works, especially when you think about the physical.Assets.

The store was built to show how Q Qualcomm's tech can bring more of the physical world online. Digital shelf labels were a starting point, a faster way to update prices and product information. Then tiny LED lighting systems help people stock and locate what they need quicker. Now with a blend of Bluetooth, video, and wireless signals, they're able to track where products.Products and people are in space and once that physical environment is mapped, AI can use that information to help automate almost every aspect of how a store operates. These empty shelves quickly became a gateway into the way Q Qualcomm and Cristiano see the future.

First thing that came to, uh, my mind is, and that's where we're walking, I said, we're gonna use this to train robots in retail. We can leveragethis.

We're here, but you're already thinking.Three steps ahead of where it goes.

I'll say our vision on industrial has been probably misunderstood. I think the investors have been tracking the numbers, but uh they kind of misunderstood what it is. Um and when we say, for example, demand is actually bound by the availability solutions. I think for the average person isWhen AI arrived, and AI is gonna change everything. It's gonna change how you're gonna buy, how you're gonna pay, and there's a lot of things. I think you've been exposed to the underbelly of all of the different technologies needs to go to because it's like a physical world, like things. It's not just software running on the cloud. You have to think about pricing, you have to think about navigating to the store, and to think about locating someone. You're gonna think about robots in that environment.and how you track uh packages, but I think that's going to be true in retail. It's going to be true. Uh, of course, it's easy to see on warehousing, on manufacturing, on healthcare, on energy, and, uh, it's exciting. I think it's, uh, that's a part of AI which is not yet understood, but it's going to be the next chapter.

I kept thinking about that as we left the warehouse, a living, breathing digital map of the physical world, where things are, where they're moving, and software that can understand and act on all of it. That's a much bigger idea than a smarter grocery store, and through that lens, Q Qualcomm's bold bets started.To come into sharper focus, the future Cristiano sees that future requires alignment of it all. I followed Cristiano throughout his day, saw the innovation, saw him in action, but I wanted to take a minute to sit down, focus, and really pick his brain about leadership. You know, as we, as we sit here and, you know, kind of relax from what I saw being a part of your day, what are some of the things that people don't see a CEO does, like specifically foryou?

First of all, managing people.And you know, everybody has uh different skills, aspirations, things that they want to do, things that are doing very well, things you need to help them uh to get there, you have to match skills of of the uh individuals to the job because you cannot do anything yourself, you have to really build an organization and do it, surround yourself with people that are gonna be better than yourself, so this whole element of people.is big. The other thing is, you get a lot of voices. You always get a lot of opinions, a lot of people think this is what you need to do, this is what we need to do, but you want to calibrate your own thinking with input, how you sort to that and you make decisions. Right? I

mean, on either side, you can go down the rabbit hole. Is there anything that brings you back?To the Cristiano balance of making decisions.

Wow, how do I answer that question? You need, you need data and you need your gut feeling. Look, in technology, it especially in this sector, the things change. Things are changing very, very fast. So, the interesting thing about this aspect, when you ask about too much data, too much intuition, you have to have a balance because data sometimes exists from the present and the past, doesn't exist for the future.So it's, for example, not criticizing anybody, not criticizing all things are important, but usually financial markets decision making is past and present. You try to project the future based on the past, but sometimes the, the future is going to go in a different direction. This is just look at this kind of conversation we have in AI.So, so data is incredibly important. I, there is true in what people say you cannot manage what you cannot measure. It's true, but it's not sufficient, especially in technology because you have to have intuition a little bit of what, what are the possibilities are gonna be in the future. You have to take some risk. You have to live with the decision you make, sometimes it's gonna be good, sometimes it's gonna be bad.And uh and I think especially for companies that are reinventing themselves, that is, uh, that's very

true. Well, I hear this in your voice and you can correct me if I'm wrong about this bold bet that you're making, and I think you talked about how markets are reacting to what you as a, you know, leader of one of the top companies in the world that you're making that maybe they may not be recognizing or giving you enough credit for in the future. Are you shaking your head? You, you kind of know where I'm going with

this? No, no, it's a good, it's a good question. Uh, look.

What is it? What is it? I know, I, I have a feeling I know what it is, but I wanna hear it from you.

No, look, uh, uh, uh, that's, it's a great topic of conversation. I think there are two topics. One topic, I'll be specific on the question.I, it's a crescendo, right? Yes, we, we always got credit for mobile. We get credit for communications. Uh, we don't yet get full credit for computing, and, um, we didn't get any credit when we said we're gonna go automotive, you know, people said, uh, you didn't buy NXP, you're not gonna be successful. Now we're getting, now we're getting credit for automotive.Um, we still don't get a lot of credit for what we're doing on the industry on the edge. If people has a feeling, oh, Qu, you know, if the edge happens, they may be a player. And of course, we're getting no credit on the data center, which is, which is fine.So the second part of the, the, of the answer is,At the end of the day, right, at the end of the day, you know, it comes down to, do you have the right technology, do you have the right products, and the product speaks for itself. So, so one part of me is I will keep repeating the message and say, here's all the reasons why you should believe in Q Qualcomm. Here's what the trend is, here's some of the assets that we have. Other part of me is, it's OK. I'm just gonna be.Continue to execute and it's gonna be like Alto when we show up, people are gonna say, oh, look what you built. OK, that, and that's what that, that's our job and we'll just continue to be, to be doing it.

It's gotta be frustrating. I mean, it's frustrating for me listening a little bit to you about like, hey, 15 billion by 2029 in data centers is small,

not frustrating for Q Qualcomm. This is our history. Just think about that. When we started as a company, we said.CDMA is the best technology. People said CDMA doesn't work. It's not even possible as a technology, so it's OK. I think the company is about proving people wrong and so we stick with ourtraditions.

It's funny that you say that being able to.Follow you all day and interacting with some of your employees, you know, it's, let's get the work done. I mean, the, what I took away. Let's get the work done. Let's figure it out and keep pushing forward. That's, that's, that was my takeaway. Yeah,

that's what I said, 50% is.Let's believe in ourselves. Let's believe in ourselves. Our ground, the Q Qualcomm ground is our technology capability. I think investors can have an opinion about whether we will succeed in one area and the other area, but it's one thing is actually true, and I'm saying this in our humility. Nobody argues about Q Qualcomm have technology capability. I think we do, and I think that's what we need and uh we'll keep building on that.

So I wanna do a couple of rapid fire questions. Is that cool? Are you ready? I'm ready. What's the first word that comes out of the future of leadership is?

Adaptability.

The future of AI is

distributed.

Whendo you make the most important decisions throughout the day?

I do. I'm not a morning person. I do better in the afternoon and the, in the evening, and especially the most important meetings will be scheduled at the end of the day because then it's open ended. Uh,

that's a tipright there for those listening to this. Is there a meeting you would love to get rid of?

Um,There is, but I don't wanna say it. I, I don't want.

I see a lot of smiles overthere,

Cristiano. I may have to ask some people here to leave before I say that.

What's one thing that you would never delegate?

You delegate responsibility. You can never delegate accountability.

I'll put an earmarkon that. I love that answer. Um, what is the, the biggest misconception for being a

CEO? Everybody will tell you the CEO is a lonely job, and, you know, in some aspects it is, but it doesn't have to be a lonely job. Look, it doesn't have to be, it doesn't have to be, you know, you walk into a room, everybody is like, uh, and, and quiet. You're just a member of the team.And you just have the trust of others, they're gonna list them, but you don't have to make it. So I work very hard to make sure it's not a lonely job because I'm a people person at the end.

Cristiano is an engineer by training, who worked his way up to running a global tech giant. He leads with a wealth of experience and from a solid foundation by following his instincts into a future that is not completely realized yet.Change is certain, but like you said, reinvention is in Qualcomm's DNA and maybe that's exactly how it should be.