Not sure if you've noticed, but AI is everywhere.
From our smartphones and laptops to the more specific Nvidia RTX 50-series GPUs and yes, even Rabbit R1s, artificial intelligence has snuck into our lives and taken over — whether we notice it or not.
We've seen the best AI video generators, like Sora, completely "wow" us with near-immediate, lifelike visuals and AI-powered productivity platforms like ChatGPT, Google Gemini and Grok offer wild features, like easily creating a video game to doing a full-blown deep dive into a family history. And that's just the tip of the digital iceberg.
AI's use cases are exponential, but it you're wondering how exactly AI is changing the way you go about your day, especially in our devices like laptops, you're not alone.
As an example, we've seen Microsoft's Copilot+ PCs and Apple Intelligence in iPhones, iPads and MacBooks, being able to generate and edit images, summarize documents and translate or transcribe audio. However, these haven't exactly been the game-changers companies want them to be.
The hype for AI in laptops doesn't appear to be quite there yet, with many believing that AI PCs are “gimmicky.” So, what is the next big step for AI in our devices?
I sat down with Nitin Kumar, senior director of product management at Qualcomm, to discuss how AI is evolving in PCs with Snapdragon X and what we can expect in the future.
What does the future of AI in PCs look like?
Qualcomm's Snapdragon X chips were the first to kick off the AI generation in Copilot+ PCs, bringing 40 TOPS (trillions of operations per second), speedier performance and better power efficiency for longer battery life.
These chips can be impressive, so much so that the Dell XPS 13 with a Snapdragon X Elite topped our list of best laptops. Now, with the rest of the lineup out, including the Snapdragon X Plus and Snapdragon X, I wondered if this "first generation" of sorts was finished with and what was coming next in laptops.
But I was corrected.
"I could be off a little bit, but let's say there are over 50 designs launched across all our OEM partners in the marketplace already, and we have more than 80 designs launched or coming in pipeline," said Kumar. "So we’re not done yet with our first generation."
"Look, our promise is delivering the value proposition of performance, low power consumption, battery life on AI devices, and new IDs, thinner IDs, IDs where less thermal is the requirement and you don't need the fan to turn on as often or the fan noise is sort of non-existent — our goal for 2025 is to continue and enrich the experience more and more."
Sure, we've heard rumors about Snapdragon X2, but the focus for Qualcomm appears to lie elsewhere. More specifically, in apps.
"We are very heavily working with the app ecosystem to bring more applications to fundamentally take the advantage of our Snapdragon architecture, to leverage and optimize more experiences on the NPU (neural processing engine)," Kumar explains.
"[We want] to drive different experiences across both consumer and commercial fronts as well that can enrich the lives of a user from what they are able to do today, and new experiences that they couldn't either do or can be done much, much better."
As Kumar explained, Qualcomm has already been doing this in several apps, and I saw it in action at CES 2025.
How AI in Snapdragon X is aiding apps
What does AI in apps on Snapdragon X systems look like? Pretty cool, so far.
During a demo, Qualcomm displayed different NPU-powered software utilizing Snapdragon X. This included music mixing software djay Pro, which could allow you to mix and adjust specific elements on a track in real time using Neural Mix.
You will see more and more apps leveraging our NPU strength and NPU capability, and that will define what new experiences you can achieve.
Nitin Kumar, Qualcomm
So, if you wanted to isolate a guitar riff or vocals in a tune while mixing live, it could be done in the click of a button via a Snapdragon X-powered PC.
Then there was Moises Live, which allows real-time audio control in all apps. That means in YouTube and Netflix, too, so you could either drown out vocals to kick up a karaoke party or keep loud explosions to a minimum while watching a movie.
More NPU-powered experiences are set to arrive, too, including multiple apps such as Zoom, Blender, Cephable, Capture One and plenty more. It's clear Qualcomm is on the right track to deliver even more AI-powered experiences to devices via apps.
"We're already doing it significantly with the app ecosystem to bring in the developer community with apps that are very well-tuned and optimized to the Snapdragon native architecture," said Kumar.
"Essentially, you will see more and more apps, more and more experiences, leveraging our NPU strength and NPU capability, and that will define what new experiences you can achieve."
So, if app developers are key to bringing these new experiences to users, whether it be for work, education, music or anything of the like, when will we see more apps take advantage of these AI-powered tools on devices?
Well, that's up to developers, but Qualcomm aims to make it easy with its AI Hub.
Offering the right tools
Qualcomm's AI Hub is a one stop-shop for developers to optimize and deploy AI models on devices (specifically Qualcomm ones), making it easier to bring AI-powered apps onto these devices. As Kumar goes on to say, though, the company had the know-how for years to make this all work.
"AI is a new buzzword that has picked up in the last couple of years, I would say, but we have been researching and investing in AI for [around] 10 to 12 years, maybe even longer," said Kumar.
"What that gives us is a fundamental advantage. We have optimized the architecture generation after generation to make sure that it's really fine-tuned for delivering a high level of AI capability."
Qualcomm has invested heavily in terms of the toolset available for a developer to write an application across PCs (and other devices) powered by Snapdragon, allowing these apps to be made available to all far more easily, and quickly.
In Kumar's words, it "provides a developer a very seamless, frictionless environment to bring their own models or take pre-optimized models and write an application for Snapdragon PCs."
"As a developer, you can create a login, take one of the optimized models that is already available, or bring your own models onto the portal, wrap it around an app and you can choose to deploy it on any of the Snapdragon X architecture, or even smartphone for that matter.
"The app will quickly compile, it will tell you ‘okay, it actually runs on a Snapdragon X PC,’ then it will give you a runtime environment of how looks and optimization techniques as well. So we have made it very easy to develop new apps."
And all a developer needs is a browser. And, well, a device to open said browser. But you get the gist.
AI in apps are the game-changer
"There's just going to be a change everywhere."
That's a line that stuck in my head during my conversation with Kumar. Yes, there have been changes to PCs and devices in general thanks to AI-powered hardware, but it appears this is only the beginning.
There was an analogy told to me during the meeting that gave me a spark. The transition to large-scale AI devices is very much in line with the shift from 3G to 4G. Sure, there was better connectivity and faster speeds, but what could it do for the general user?
At an immediate glance, it could be seen as a faster way to browse the web, but it brought a whole new scope to developers.
With its significantly faster mobile data speeds, support for a huge scale of users simultaneously on a network and reduced latency, 4G allowed social media apps like Instagram to thrive with easy access and near-instant posting, video streaming on phones to become the norm so apps like YouTube and Netflix could be used on the go and ride-sharing services like Uber to flourish with real-time navigation.
Now, with AI on PCs, we could only be seeing the start of this kind of progression.
"You could be an artist, a video creator, in the productivity side or you could just be like someone who's just using a laptop to browse on the web. No matter who you are, I fundamentally believe the strength in the technology is so massive that it's going to completely transform the experience on every single front," Kumar states.
As for Qualcomm's further plans for Snapdragon itself, Kumar seems confident and excited about what's coming next for AI and PCs.
"We have the AI research, we have invested in the AI hardware, we have the right developer relationships and we have the right tools.," said Kumar. "The use case has been stagnant in terms of just typing, but I think the technology will lead us there on its own, and the devices will evolve as the experiences evolve."
More from Tom's Guide
- I review PCs for a living, and Apple Intelligence is already better than Windows Copilot
- 'AI laptops' hype is not what you think — PC makers won't like me revealing this secret
- Forget a mouse — Chromebooks can now be controlled with your face
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