Qualcomm wants AI agents to spend your money — with your OK

Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon used the opening keynote of Snapdragon Summit 2026 in Maui to lay out a future in which AI agents on your phone buy things on your behalf — and argued that the technology will earn the trust to do it.

"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 stage.

The stakes are straightforward. Qualcomm has spent years pitching on-device AI agents that know your habits and preferences well enough to act for you, including spending money on necessities, gifts and travel. Nobody has yet solved the core problem: how an agent decides to pull the trigger on a purchase, and how much input you keep. The worst-case fear — an agent draining a bank account or running up a credit card — is why the design of consent matters before this market can exist at all.

Confirmation before checkout

Qualcomm's answer, presented roughly 45 minutes into the keynote, is an agent that repeatedly checks in before it spends anything. In a demo, a woman wearing smart glasses walks past a store; the AI agent notes she previously bought sunscreen and lip balm there and asks whether she wants more. She approves, and the agent tells her the goods are ready for pickup. Later, when she chooses a laptop, the agent asks her to confirm the purchase before completing it.

The reviewer found one wrinkle: after the purchase, the agent followed up with a reminder about credit card rewards points, reading like a nagging ad — though, in Qualcomm's model, a user could tell their agent to suppress it. The consumer-critical piece was the confirmation gate, especially for a purchase costing several thousand dollars.

"The agent needs to authenticate and operate and keep you in control," Amon said.

Mastercard as the trust bridge

Qualcomm shrewdly anchored its pitch in brands consumers already trust. Mastercard CEO Michael Miebach, 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 required for an AI agent acting on someone's behalf — trust he argued would come from an established brand like Mastercard.

The analogy is online shopping itself. Decades of thawing skepticism turned a dubious process into a default behavior. AI agents push the separation between people and their money one step further, and Qualcomm's bet is that another bridge of trust — built from confirmation prompts and payment-network backstops — will get consumers across it.

In a media roundtable 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, SVP of premium mobile and AI business unit, argued financial institutions must sit at the center of it, the same way they already absorb fraudulent charges when a card is stolen.

"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.

The agent runs on the phone

In a demo room after the keynote, Qualcomm's Francisco Cheng, senior director of product marketing, demonstrated the concept wearing off-the-shelf TCL Rayneo smart glasses. He looked at a poster for a Hawaiian volcano experience; the AI agent recommended a specific tour; and when Cheng confirmed, the agent — running on a connected smartphone — handed the transaction to Mastercard to complete the purchase. Disputes would, 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.

Cheng admitted people will remain gunshy about the whole process, but noted that trusted brands now handle every step — exactly as happened 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."

Qualcomm's framing makes the roadmap explicit: agents that propose, humans who confirm, and payment networks that catch the mistakes. Whether consumers accept that bargain will decide if agent-driven commerce becomes as unremarkable as paying bills online — or stalls at the confirmation prompt.