How Qualcomm’s CIO is placing big bets on AI to support the chip company’s diversification push

Attila Tinic spent three decades in the telecommunications sector, but it was his most-recent role in the field—serving as chief information officer at EchoStar—that inspired his next gig as CIO at semiconductor company Qualcomm.

During Tinic’s time at EchoStar, the satellite internet provider had grand ambitions to become the U.S.’s fourth major carrier under its Dish brand, a diversification plan that didn’t exactly pan out as envisioned. Last year, Dish ditched those aspirations, and in June 2026, the subsidiary filed for bankruptcy after deals to sell spectrum licenses to AT&T and SpaceX hadn’t closed in time.

But at Qualcomm, efforts to diversify the business away from relying too much on the volatile smartphone market have been far more fruitful. Last year, Qualcomm unveiled new AI accelerator chips to better compete with Nvidia and AMD. There have also been reports that Qualcomm is working with OpenAI on a new smartphone AI chip.

And last month, Qualcomm’s shares jumped when it unveiled new fiscal 2029 revenue targets during the company’s investor day, including projections that non-handset revenue would reach $40 billion and data center sales would total $15 billion. Qualcomm’s revenue and earnings results for the first two quarters of 2026 exceeded Wall Street’s expectations, even as the global smartphone market is expected to contract at the steepest rate on record.

“I was intrigued by the diversification strategy,” says Tinic of joining Qualcomm in February 2025. He found it alluring to join the company as it aimed to remake its business with bigger bets on data centers, automotive, the internet of things, and other adjacent markets.

One of Tinic’s earliest moves when stepping into the CIO role was the creation of centralized data and AI teams, rather than embedding those resources into various infrastructure and application teams.

He has also supported the generous deployment of AI tools across the company, including AI coding assistants, Microsoft Copilot, and generative AI features from vendors including cloud-based software provider ServiceNow, Salesforce’s messaging platform Slack, and Atlassian’s project management software product, Jira. 

“Things are moving so quickly that I think if anyone thinks that they can completely go it alone, they’re going to be left behind,” says Tinic.

Some internal AI use cases that are changing workflows include the use of AI agents to validate purchase orders autonomously, with the AI system even assigning an accuracy score to each document so that customer service team members can spend their time focused on hunting down the exact details that are wrong or unfilled.

Another example came from Tinic’s IT team, which created an autonomous AI agent to handle almost the entire process for refreshing a worker’s laptop. 

Within Qualcomm, Tinic says AI tools are widely adopted to support the software testing life cycle, as well as for research and personal productivity. What’s more challenging is how to rethink end-to-end workflows in a manner that’s different from past technology waves, where automation was on the margins. Rethinking work is an even greater unknown as autonomous AI agents become more popular.

“With AI agents and having a digital workforce, they can work differently; they can do a lot of reasoning,” says Tinic. “Your workflow itself really needs to be rethought.”

Tinic says he assesses progress through three impact........

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