The appointment and September 2 start date
Qualcomm Incorporated announced on August 21 that Sergio Buniac will join the company as executive vice president and group general manager of Mobile, Compute and Personal AI at Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., with the role taking effect September 2. He will report directly to Qualcomm president and chief executive officer Cristiano Amon and oversee the company's smartphone, personal computing, smart wearables and extended reality businesses, as well as what Qualcomm describes as a new generation of AI devices.
Buniac's Motorola background
Buniac joins Qualcomm after more than three decades at Motorola, where he held regional and worldwide roles spanning strategy, product management, sales, marketing, operations and supply chain. Since 2018 he served as President of Motorola Devices, leading the company's global handset business. His appointment is framed by Qualcomm as bringing experience in taking consumer devices from design through to commercialization.
Strategic shift toward personal AI devices
The new Mobile, Compute and Personal AI grouping reflects Qualcomm's effort to extend its Snapdragon platform beyond smartphones into personal computing, wearables, XR and what the company calls agentic AI. CEO Amon said Buniac's track record of driving innovation, transforming businesses and leading through industry transitions would be "instrumental as we expand experiences powered by Snapdragon platforms in the age of agentic AI."
What Buniac's role covers
In his new position, Buniac will be responsible for the company's handset business together with its personal computing, smart wearables and XR lines, areas Qualcomm is positioning at the centre of its push to monetise AI workloads on-device. Qualcomm highlighted that Motorola, one of its key customers, has expanded generative-AI features in its smartphones, a relationship Buniac is expected to deepen from the chip supplier side.
Reporting line and succession context
Reporting directly to Amon places Buniac at the head of one of Qualcomm's largest product groups at a time when the company is broadening from a mobile-chip focus toward an AI-device platform strategy. How his finished-product perspective from Motorola integrates with Qualcomm's platform business is now a key question for the company's AI-device roadmap following the September 2 transition.
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