Why Qualcomm's Playbook For Scaling AI Starts With Intention -- And Ends With A Human

The enterprise AI toolkit is flush with options, but clear strategies for using it responsibly often remain scarce. As foundational models improve and early application-layer winners emerge, the conversation is moving past basic plug-and-play systems as IT leaders prioritize governance, oversight, and long-term value, not just faster execution of legacy tasks.

Brent Summers, Senior Marketing Manager at Qualcomm Technologies, is helping push that shift forward. From brand voice guardrails to security-first agent design, his approach offers a blueprint for automating AI tasks with intention in marketing organizations.

• In use vs. in control: With 91% of B2B marketing orgs already using AI, any edge is measured in months, not years. "Only 19% felt like they had a strategy," Summers said. "And I think that's an area where we're leading—we have responsible AI policies." Strategic maturity isn't just about adoption. It's about intention. "We've been building products with AI functionality for more than 15 years now and integrating AI into our internal workflows for over two."

For organizations aiming to improve their AI maturity, Summers offered a clear framework: "A generative AI use case has three major components—what is the task you're trying to do, what are the inputs required to do that, and what do the outputs look like?"

• R&D & ROI: That measured approach to AI is already paying off. "We view that as increased productivity, not just efficiency," Summers said. The clearest gains so far come from reclaimed time, tracked through self-reported attribution and satisfaction surveys. "If I get back two or four hours of tedium, I'm presumably applying that to more strategic tasks."

For go-to-market and marketing functions, vague goals won’t cut it. "It's not enough to say, ‘my use case is writing an article.’ You need to define who the audience is, what the topic is, the length, the style," Summers explained.

• Always on-brand: AI isn’t churning out content, it’s sparking ideas. "We're using AI as a thought partner to contemplate strategies, challenge us with innovative ideas, to find white space where we can offer really potent original thought leadership," Summers said. To keep that creative process aligned with the brand, Summers leans on built-in controls. "We have very verbose guidelines for what the Snapdragon brand voice is." "We use Writer features that help me say things in plain English, then our brand copywriter agent generates potential rewrites with our Snapdragon brand voice applied."

Ultimately, a human audience requires human oversight. Summers warned against spreading resources too thin. "People need to be really thoughtful around which use cases they're going to pursue, because there's more surface area than resources who can responsibly triage."

"We expect a human to verify the facts, citations, decisions, and the underlying strategy. Is it ethical? Does it adhere to our Responsible AI Principles and policies? That’s the bar," he said. "We've taken a deliberately conservative stance, with a human in the loop, across all of our marketing communications." No autonomous publishing, no unchecked workflows. It’s a posture that reflects not just caution, but a deep respect for brand trust and reputational risk.