The keynote kicking off Snapdragon Summit 2026 in Maui had the latest forecast for how AI agents will organize our lives through the phones in our pockets. Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon spent some time walking viewers through how the agents will buy things for them, preparing for the day when AI will have access to our bank accounts or credit cards — and why that’s a good idea.
For years, Qualcomm has pitched a future where AI agents on your devices know your habits and preferences well enough to make informed decisions on your behalf. Eventually, this will include the capability to spend your money on things such as necessities, gifts and travel. The question is how agents will decide whether or not to pull the trigger on a purchase — and how much input you’ll have on what decisions they make. Nobody’s figured this out yet, and might not for some time. The fear is that an AI agent would run off with your bank account numbers, clear out your savings and run up your credit card. But at this year’s summit, Qualcomm suggested how this might actually work, wherein agents would repeatedly check in before they spend your money.
“When an agent is acting as a proxy of you, you need to trust the agent, and you need to trust the device, especially for something like shopping,” Amon said on the keynote stage.
Naturally, the CEO was pitching a method with his company’s technology at the center, but it was at least sensitive to the uncertainties people likely have about an AI buying things for them. He said that the company is developing technologies to protect personal information and provide a secure device environment.
“The agent needs to authenticate and operate and keep you in control,” Amon said.
Around 45 minutes into the keynote, Qualcomm presented a way this might go. A woman wearing smart glasses walks past a store when the AI agent suggests that, in the past, she’d bought sunscreen and lip balm from that location — did she want to buy more? She okays the purchase, and the AI agent says she can go pick up her goods. She then proceeds down the street and asks the agent about getting a laptop, and the AI agent guides her to a shop where she can view several on display. She decides on one, but the agent asks her to confirm the purchase first.
I didn’t love everything about the demo, as her purchase was followed by a reminder about her credit card rewards points in what felt like a nagging ad, but that’s probably a personal preference I could tell my AI agent to avoid. From a consumer standpoint, the most important part was waiting for confirmation before making a purchase — especially when plunking down several thousand dollars for a pricey computer.
Qualcomm is treading carefully here, and shrewdly brought in execs from a trusted purchasing platform to reassure viewers that the financial institutions they already trust will be part of the process. MasterCard CEO Michael Miebach, speaking in a prerecorded video, reaffirmed that people will only use processes they trust to keep their payments and data secure; on stage, Amon was joined by MasterCard senior fellow Raja Rajamannar, who spoke plainly about the implicit trust that an AI agent would work on their behalf — which will come from a brand they already trust, such as Mastercard.
This is all self-promotional, but they’re speaking to relatable uncertainty. Over the past decades, people have become a lot more comfortable with online shopping, with the initial skepticism thawing as the process became trustworthy. AI agents further separate people from the act of handing over their hard-earned cash, so another bridge of trust must be built. Envisioning the next process with clear moments when an AI agent will stop to ask people before making purchases on their behalf is reassuring amid uncertainty about a new way to spend money.
The long road to letting AI agents pay for you #
The technology at the center of the process is the AI agent itself, which runs on your smartphone. In a media roundtable discussion after the keynote, Chris Patrick, Qualcomm SVP and general manager of handsets, emphasized that building consumer trust in the process would take time.
Dino Bekis, Qualcomm SVP of premium mobile and AI business unit, reasoned that the answer will include a lot of reassurance by making financial institutions a central part of the process. Just as institutions now take care of fraudulent charges or other mistaken purchases when your credit card is stolen, there will need to be reassurances if AI agents wrongly buy something that consumers didn’t approve.
“Financials [will need to] do some level of backstop to say, hey, you as a consumer, if this happens, there’s going to be some level of consumer protection for you, right?” Bekis said.
Later on, I wandered into a demo room where Qualcomm showed off concepts revealed on stage, one of which simulated how an AI agent would buy something for you. The demonstration followed three clear steps: identifying something to buy, the AI agent finding a relevant suggestion to ask about buying it and the actual purchase process.
Qualcomm’s Francisco Cheng, senior director of product marketing, wearing off-the-shelf TCL Rayneo smart glasses, looked at a poster for an experience (aptly, a Hawaiian volcano). The AI agent recommended a particular tour of a nearby volcano, and when Cheng confirmed that he’d like to buy it, the agent — running on a connected smartphone — handed the transaction over to Mastercard to make the purchase. Any disputes could, in theory, be resolved by the credit card company.
“I think if there’s a level of mistrust by letting an agent handle things through and through, at least Mastercard can step in as a trusted payment provider to handle that piece of it,” Cheng said.
People will still surely be gunshy about the whole process, Cheng admitted, but at least there are trusted brands handling every step of the process. And that’s exactly how it went with online shopping.
“I’m old enough to remember when I was skeptical about making online payments, about doing banking transactions online. I was comfortable writing a check to somebody,” Cheng said. “But today, I wouldn’t even think twice about paying bills online. It’s a learning process.”