How Qualcomm Is Using AI to Power Autonomous Driving ｜ CES 2026

Hey, I'm Derek Powell, and I'm here at CES EPIC Qualcomm booth with Anshuman Saxena, who is the VP and GM of ADAS and Robotics at Qualcomm. Great to be here at CES once again. How is AI transforming Qualcomm's role in autonomous driving? Yeah, no, actually, that's a great one, right? So we are now going in a phase of AI-driven vehicles versus how the architecture of the cars were thought about. Now it's what can you do from AI perspective? The domains are autonomous driving or automated driving. Then the experiences that you can get, the navigation that you can get, all that connected into one single chassis, which we call as a Snapdragon digital chassis. The sensors around the car, of course, they do the driving in a safe way, but can they bring in extra information which can help you to do the contextual conversations or contextual driving? That is what we are bringing to the table. So you're bringing a lot of stuff into one chip. Absolutely. You have to have that information from the sensors, from the cloud, the language inputs, all operating together in a power-efficient way. That's what we are bringing in as a differentiation in the central compute in the cars with cockpit and ride-only process. Well, everything you're saying about Qualcomm's experience and approach to ADAS is very exciting, and I can't wait to ride with this Qualcomm Flex. So thank you for your time. Really appreciate it. Derek Powell here at CES with Anshuman Saxena. Thank you. Thanks, Derek. Thank you very much. I'm here at CES with Rajat Sagar from Qualcomm. Thanks, Derek. Thanks for having me. Let's ride on. So in a nutshell, what is Flex? So, Derek, Flex is a compute and software platform that Qualcomm has launched, which brings together multi-domain capabilities on a centralized SoC. What Flex does is that it brings a generalized compute platform. So it takes all of those different units, all of those different computers, and then smooshes it down to one tiny chip. Absolutely. And, you know, it's easier said that it all takes that and puts it down in a single chip. But in reality, designing this, we had to go solve for mixed criticality, for functional safety, how do we isolate multiple applications so that a safe application such as ADAS can keep running while, you know, multiple applications on Android and media, which are less safety critical, can run on the site. I think the most revolutionary change is really what's happening now with the realization of software-defined vehicles, the realization of a truly AI chassis in the vehicle. So that's what sets it apart, is being able to aggregate all of that data through one chip and give you a simplified answer. Exactly. Yeah.