Qt Group Plc | Press Release | March 9, 2026 at 11:00 am EET
Software teams get a quick-start to prototyping and developing Industrial AI devices, thanks to Qt being pre-optimized for use with Qualcomm® Dragonwing IQ series platforms
Espoo, Finland, March 9, 2026 - Qt Group (Nasdaq, Helsinki: QTCOM) has collaborated with Qualcomm to simplify the experience of building Edge AI devices in factories of the future. The collaboration will see Qt framework pre-optimized for use with Qualcomm Technologies' high-performance Dragonwing IQ series processors for IoT. This will help businesses ship smart factory applications faster by abstracting away the manual labour that software developers face in configuring hardware and AI programming before a single line of application code is written.
As industrial automation shifts to real-time, on-device intelligence, developers are often slowed by low-level system integration with custom Linux builds and complex AI plumbing. By pre-optimizing Qt's cross-platform UI framework for use with operating systems supported by Qualcomm Technologies' industrial-grade processors, developers get an experience that works out of the box with Qualcomm® Linux. With frictionless onboarding, teams can jump into creating Edge AI use cases on the target hardware of their choice almost instantly.
"We've built the Dragonwing IQ series to be the engine of the high-performance industrial revolution," says Anand Venkatesan, Senior Director, Product Management, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. "But true innovation happens when businesses can focus on the core user experiences of making great devices, instead of the plumbing. Working with Qt means our SoCs give our customers a platform that is ready to run out of the box quickly, and which can integrate AI models into the user experience in just a few lines of code. For both new and veteran developers alike, that makes the process of building cutting-edge industrial IoT devices as accessible as web development."
By leveraging Qt Edge AI, the collaboration also turns the complex integration of AI pipelines into just a few lines of code, saving significant time and cost. Developers can implement sophisticated use cases like voice-activated factory management, 3D-guided predictive maintenance, worker safety monitoring, and defect detection without needing to be deep AI specialists. Integration of various AI models from Qualcomm Technologies (and Edge Impulse) also frees businesses from vendor lock-in by allowing developers to swap between models easily, without rewriting their core application.
"Factories need the freedom to experiment without boundaries if they're going to embrace AI," says Thilak Ramanna, Senior Vice President at Qt Group. "This collaboration builds on our existing work with Qualcomm Technologies to supercharge UI development for industrial IoT and takes it to the next level. As we begin to see more multimodal, AI-assisted user interfaces, we want to give developers that near-instant onboarding to make the realisation of new devices frictionless. Developers will also have access to Qt Group's full end-to-end offering, from UI design to testing and software quality tools."
In addition to Qualcomm® Linux, Qt is also available for Ubuntu on Qualcomm® for IoT Platforms, which will also support Ubuntu out of the box. This will allow developers an alternative open-source path for fast on-device UI and application prototyping with Qt.
Over the last decade, Qt has been ported to several of Qualcomm Technologies' system-on-chip (SoC) products in industrial automation and the automotive industry to streamline the process of developing and testing user interfaces for embedded and IoT devices. At Embedded World 2026 in Germany, Qt Group and Qualcomm Technologies will showcase several real-world AI use cases for the factory of the future at booth 4-258.
About Qt Group
Qt Group (Nasdaq Helsinki: QTCOM) is a global software company, trusted by industry leaders and over 1.5 million developers worldwide to create applications and smart devices that users love. We help our customers increase productivity through the entire product development journey: from UI design to software development, optimizing embedded systems, and quality management. Our customers are in more than 70 different industries in over 180 countries. Qt Group employs some 1100 people, and its net sales in 2025 were 216.3 MEUR. To learn more, visit www.qt.io.
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Use-case FAQ for Journalists
- Factory Management: A factory overview console with an AI chatbot using the Llama3.1 8B Large Language Model and Whisper Small for Automatic Speech Recognition
- Defect Detection: Visual quality inspection of manufactured products using a YoloPro model trained by Edge Impulse
- Predictive Maintenance: 3D-visualized guidance for part replacement, with natural language interactive instructions and Retrieval-Augmented-Generation (Llama3.1 8B instruct via Genie) Llama 3.1 8Bn
- Worker Safety: PPE and safety zone detection utilizing YoloPro, trained by Edge Impulse
- Access Control: Face detection & recognition with local vision AI on lower-cost SoCs
