ET9 Talks Ep.48: Dialogue with Mr. Nakul Duggal, Executive Vice President at Qualcomm

Added: 2026-05-07

[00:00:00]I'm here every 3 months, every 4 months.

[00:00:02]You know, what I what I really like about it is that like the rate of adoption of AI in China is just fantastic, but it would only be possible if you did not have companies like NIO and so many of your other competitors build such fantastic products so quickly.

[00:00:27]Great to be with you, William, and thank you so much.

[00:00:29]How about Beijing Auto Show?

[00:00:31]Fantastic. Probably double of what I was expecting. It's just crazy. I was just hearing about how many cars have been launched already.

[00:00:39]18 new models in 2026? Lots of launching events in past several days. Yeah. And you know what William, what amazed me was the variety of cars. So, now of course it's the smart cabin, it's the smart living space, it's ADAS, but the variety and the differentiation and the types of lifestyle cars is fantastic.

[00:00:58]Very, very impressed.

[00:01:00]But most of the cars are based on the smart cabin or based on the Qualcomm solution, yeah. So, we're very happy. We are very happy. We are very happy.

[00:01:08]>> [laughter] >> We are we are very honored. Yeah. We are very privileged to be I think yeah, that's why I said the Qualcomm and NIO innovate a lot of new technology in the past several years at very beginning.

[00:01:22]You know, for me what I'm very grateful for is we built so many partnerships with so many companies including NIO many years ago, 5 6 years ago. Yeah. And the vision that you all had in terms of what the car needs to look like, we have been included as part of that vision. And as the cars have evolved, as AI has come in, you know, there was no AI 6 No, yeah, yeah. At that time no no one talked about AI. But now as AI comes in, it just becomes a part and parcel of that experience. Just being able to grow with the ecosystem, we are very grateful. I remember so several years ago when we talked about the future of the car, we said the car will become AI companion, a smart mobile living room. So, now it's reality. It's real. It's real. Yes. So, now everyone are talking about AI. So, what's the plan for Qualcomm the smart AI cabin?

[00:02:15]So, I think the car is very unique platform where it has to be real time. It can't depend upon connectivity.

[00:02:22]You can't imagine that all connectivity will be there. If it's not there, what do we do? So, AI has to run in the car.

[00:02:28]Now, obviously with ADAS, it already runs in the car. It is real time. It is safety critical.

[00:02:33]To be able to run AI in the car for experiences that you build, it comes [clears throat] down to the capability of the model. And the models are getting very capable.

[00:02:41]If I think about models that are textual, they are already becoming very intelligent. So, we are spending now with our latest Snapdragon Gen 5, we can support mixture of experts model running locally. You have the Google Cloud.

[00:02:52]That's very important for us. It has to It has to run locally. It has to. You can't You can't You can't depend on the cloud.

[00:03:00]Yeah, you you should have a local capability. Yeah, and in fact it has to be multimodal because now with vision language action models, you have to be able to not just look at video, but audio, text, interaction, what was actually meant. So, this has now started and I expect over the next 2 years you will start to see a tremendous amount of innovation where if you can understand what the customer, what the user is trying to do, you can interpret locally what that experience looks looks like.

[00:03:26]So, so it'll be multimodal. That I think is one major big shift that appears I think to see.

[00:03:32]I think the other is you know, and you start to see robotics now around us so much. The car is becoming this physical embodiment.

[00:03:40]>> It's a It's a already a It is a robot when you're driving.

[00:03:43]The experience inside is one then of what is the experience going to look like when you have time by yourself. Can you talk to an agent? Can you talk to an avatar?

[00:03:54]So, the platform is a very unique platform because there is no such platform where you're spending so much time moving from A to B. The platform is autonomous. The experience inside is agentic.

[00:04:04]That is why for us it's very important to make sure that we keep pushing the boundary of AI inside the cabin because we feel like experiences will keep evolving. That's where we're spending time. That's why by the way we introduced Gen 5 early last year. We will launch 15 OEMs in 2026. 15 in 2026 that we know of now.

[00:04:24]So, there may be more. We're only in April.

[00:04:25]>> [laughter] >> And we are developing know me intelligence for based on the Qualcomm solution and the performance is very, very good. And we [clears throat] developed several series of models based on Qualcomm chips. So, the performance is above our expectation. So, it's a thanks for the support of two teams, the ecosystem. That's most important part of the Qualcomm solutions. That is great to hear. And what I what I love to hear from you, William, is you bet on our platform for so many generations. You keep improving the quality of the experience. We have a certain baseline experience. We keep adding to it. And then with AI, you just improve. You just bring in a brand new experience. So, being able to have that kind of a partnership and relationship with your teams, we are just very proud to be.

[00:05:13]Sometimes our team are tough because we want to push limits.

[00:05:19]Lots of requests from Qualcomm. Yes. And that is frankly very important for us because we want to work with customers. We want to work with partners who will push the boundaries of the platform, of the technology, also of time. Because it's a very competitive market and things are moving very fast. So, we would not be where we are. We would not have the success if we did not have partners.

[00:05:40]Every year So, I'm here every 3 months, every 4 months.

[00:05:43]You know, what I what I really like about it is that the rate at which the consumer is able [clears throat] to adopt new technology also has to be there for companies like NIO to be able to introduce new technology.

[00:05:55]And so, what is marvelous for me is to be able to have this continuous cycle of being able to move faster and faster for better and better capability. Like the rate of adoption of AI in China is just fantastic, but it would only be possible if you did not have companies like NIO and so many of your other competitors build such fantastic products so quickly. So, that is really fantastic.

[00:06:17]Yes, thank you. Thank you, Nakul. Thank you.

[00:06:20]Very good to see you. Thank you.

[00:06:21]>> Thank you. Yeah.