G4 EZ EE THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, MARCH 27 , 2022
BY DANIELLE ABRIL
The future of how we work will,
in a few years, include smart
glasses that transport workers
into augmented or virtual reality
environments, communicating
with your co-workers via a
hologram from anywhere in the
world or relying on robots
powered by artificial intelligence
to help run manufacturing
operations.
That’s the direction technology
is headed, says Cristiano Amon,
president and CEO of wireless
chip firm Qualcomm. Amon, who
started at Qualcomm 27 years ago
as an engineer, rose through the
ranks to take the top job at the
San Diego-based company on
June 30. Since becoming CEO, he
has been working to diversify
Qualcomm’s business from
focusing primarily on chips for
mobile phones to those used in
self-driving cars, A.I.-enabled
manufacturing machines and
more powerful and battery-
efficient laptops. He says
Qualcomm’s biggest challenge
now is the semiconductor
industry not having enough
supply to meet demand and
hiring talented workers.
“Everything is becoming
intelligent,” Amon said in a recent
interview with The Washington
Post. “We’ve been focused on
providing all of the chips that go
into all of those smart devices,
whether it is a robot in
manufacturing, whether it is a
drone for agriculture, whether it’s
a point of sale when in retail.”
The majority of Qualcomm’s
growth is still being driven by
chips for mobile phones. In the
first quarter, the company
reported net income of
$3.4 billion on revenue of
$10.71 billion, 56 percent of which
came from the mobile chip
business. But Amon highlighted
the growth of other chip sets for
connected devices, which
increased nearly the same
percentage as mobile chips.
Given that Qualcomm chips
power many of the devices we
use, we sat down with Amon to
discuss how he sees technology
transforming the way we will
work in the future. The following
interview has been edited for
clarity.
‘Flexible’ workplace
Q: You announced last year that
Qualcomm would implement a
“flexible” workplace. What does
that look like now?
A: We are going to get everyone
back to the office in about a
couple of weeks, but different
geographies may have already
started. Employees wanted to
keep the best of work from home,
but also at the same time
maintain the key elements of our
culture like collaboration. People
can work from home around
three days in a week. Two days in
a week, people are going to go
into the office and every
organization is going to pick one
day of those two that everybody’s
going to get back together at the
same time.
Q: What does the future of work
look like over time?
A: We think the next-generation
PC for work from anywhere is
going to be different and
connected with 5G. We’re making
improvements for augmented
reality and virtual reality, as we
think about a metaverse, to
connect people in the office to
people who are not in the office.
Q: What is the biggest
technological barrier right now to
making hybrid work more
efficient?
A: High-performance
connectivity is a very big one,
especially because what we
learned is work from anywhere
requires high-quality video. We as
a society just finally embraced
video telephony as the killer
application. We also need high-
performance connectivity so you
cannot only access information
but collaborate with others.
Having long battery life so you
can actually do that from the
cloud will also be important.
Tech at work
Q: What can tech companies like
Qualcomm do to make the hybrid
work transition easier for
workers?
A: We have the ability to build on
what we learned during the
pandemic. The importance of
video collaboration, for example,
why not make that a hologram?
More important is how can we
build technology that allows
people to remain productive
wherever they are, not only
having access to devices and in
the cloud but having the ability to
do that at a very high speed.
Q: How will developments in 5G
change the way workers in
different industries do their jobs
in the future?
A: The role of 5G is very broad. 5G
is the easiest way to have all your
data in the cloud so everybody
can access it remotely and protect
all that data. 5G is changing
manufacturing as you connect 5G
to robots. They are now driven via
the cloud, the data goes to the
cloud, and you apply artificial
intelligence to improve the data.
5G is changing retail, building
indoor navigation systems. At
many retail stores you can make
an order online and somebody
will handpick your product. How
they navigate the store and locate
everything [through in-store
navigation systems requires 5G
connectivity].
Q: For office workers, how will 5G
change the devices needed for the
future of work?
A: It’s already changing. At
Mobile World Congress in
Barcelona, we announced
together with Lenovo the very
first ThinkPad laptop for the
future of work. It is 5G-
connected, and it is a laptop for
the enterprise [workforce] with
28 hours of battery life. So that’s
how we see the industry already
adapting and building devices
that are going to be needed for
this work-from-anywhere
environment.
The metaverse at work
Q: Will the metaverse ever be
adopted by the masses and
should we expect it to change the
way we work?
A: The number of devices that are
being built for virtual reality,
augmented reality, mixed reality
is not a small number by any
metric. Tech is not far away from
being able to have [smart]
glasses. You’ll be able to walk into
a room and capture the image,
and it will immediately go to the
Internet and say these are the
connections you have with
people, here’s information from
this person’s social network. You
can get trained on things that you
don’t know. You get step-by-step
instructions in your glasses. But
more important, the future of
how we communicate with each
other is going to be via
holograms. [Using holograms,
remote workers would be able to
project a 3D digital image of
themselves into a physical
meeting, capturing their
expressions and body
movements.]
Q: What are the metaverse
applications to work?
A: Everybody is going back to the
office. It used to be everybody is
on Zoom or Teams or you get
everybody in a conference room.
When you mix the two, the
experience is not that great. One
key work application we’re seeing
right now is how you can connect
people that are not physically in a
conference room with people that
are, so that everybody has the
same experience. The other
application is how you think
about working from home. When
we launched the ThinkPad [from
Lenovo], we also announced an
accessory that goes along with it.
You put on glasses and you’ll see
external monitors around your
laptop. We’re just at the
beginning of that change.
Q: How do you think technology
providers will address the issues
surrounding the metaverse —
cost, bulkiness, uncomfortable
physical side effects?
A: There are a lot of
improvements coming. We see
latency, or the time delay,
becoming smaller and smaller as
we get more advanced processors
and faster connectivity. That
helps prevent people from getting
sick or nauseated. But more
important is the significant
development in form factors.
We’re probably about two or three
years away of having form factors
that really look like glasses, not a
head mounted display. That’s
going to give the metaverse
significant scale.
FUTURE OF WORK
Smart glasses, holograms are
in sight, Qualcomm CEO says
ISTOCK/WASHINGTON POST ILLUSTRATION
ALBERT GEA/REUTERS
Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon started working at the company
27 years ago and has been in the top job since June 30.
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