Qualcomm entered 2025, like many big technology companies, facing skepticism around AI. Audiences had heard promises about edge AI capabilities for years now, but lacked tangible proof these systems could perform under real-world conditions. Following our work at Snapdragon Summit 2024, which brought immersive applications of on-device AI to life, Qualcomm tasked us with demonstrating their AI stack’s readiness through a series of live, high-stakes, CEO-led activations.
Our objectives were threefold: first, shift perception of edge AI from theoretical to functional by deploying it in live environments with no safety net. Second, create experiences where audiences could directly test, verify, and believe in the capabilities themselves. Third, wow Qualcomm’s universe of stakeholders - consumers, developers, and media - at three major global events: SXSW, Computex Taipei, and Snapdragon Summit 2026.
Success would be measured by a blend of experiential engagement metrics, and the fidelity of the technology we created itself. We needed to create experiences that made people truly believe the technology was real, not by watching it work, but by testing it for themselves.
Strategy
Across SXSW, COMPUTEX Taipei, and Snapdragon Summit, we designed a year-long experiential strategy anchored in a single principle: make people walk away saying “I was there when the future felt real.” We deployed Qualcomm’s edge AI stack in progressively complex scenarios where failure would be public and immediate.
SXSW: Setting the Foundation with a First-of-Its Kind Agentic Q&A
At SXSW, we built an on-device agent powered by a single Snapdragon laptop, which became the engine for a live Q&A with CEO Cristiano Amon. The agent processed 2,000 audience questions in real-time, clustered themes, and helped Cristiano facilitate a dialogue with attending and remote viewers as naturally as he might respond to a reporter on stage. The agent procured responses with an average 6-second latency, running entirely on-device with no cloud support. Attendees submitted questions through their phones while watching the AI work, and adapt, in real-time on stage. The challenge was proving the tech could handle volume and complexity simultaneously in front of a demanding tech audience. The result? The bedrock of four future conversational AI experiences for Qualcomm.
Computex Taipei: Evolving the Agent
For Computex Taipei — the world’s largest technology conference — we evolved the system to ask Amon completely unscripted questions based on aggregate d attendee inputs, which he responded to on stage with no safety net. Hundreds of concurrent queries pushed the system toward real-world load, giving global press and partners a first-hand look at multi-step reasoning under practice.
Snapdragon Summit: The Culmination
At Snapdragon Summit, Qualcomm’s flagship event, we wondered — what if a keynote moment planned and executed itself, live, on stage? We surrounded Summit with agentic systems, deploying agents across multiple human-centered scenarios. During Amon’s keynote, which coincided with Qualcomm’s 40th anniversary, an agent planned and executed a live party, including personalizing and getting roughly 850 cupcakes for attendees.
We also created four immersive experience zones where guests directly engaged with edge AI.
Across 278 sessions, people didn’t watch demos—they used the technology and internalized its capability.
Engagement exceeded internal expectations at every stop. SXSW drew audiences above two thousand. Computex Taipei reached a similar scale with the added dimension of international press coverage across Asia and European technology publications. Snapdragon Summit’s hands-on experiences achieved 278 complete sessions with attendees. Local processing across each agent remained on Snapdragon laptops, safeguarding every byte. And external media including PCMag highlighting the “You-Niverse” Qualcomm is creating, with AI as UI and hybrid multi-device agency.
