By Sachin Mohan · AIM Media House
Every earnings season, executives explain why AI is not a threat to their business. Most of those explanations involve retraining, productivity gains, or adjacent opportunities.
BlackBerry CEO John Giamatteo offered a different argument on the company's Q4 FY2026 earnings call in April, and it is more structurally compelling than most. "AI is probabilistic by nature, meaning outputs can vary," Giamatteo said on the call.
"But the QNX platform is deterministic, delivering the same result every time without exception. That distinction matters enormously when our software controls the vehicle safety features such as adaptive cruise control or autonomous drive." The logic extends beyond automotive.
An AI-driven heart pump cannot have a probabilistic output. An autonomous surgical robot cannot produce a result that varies. An industrial automation system controlling high-voltage equipment cannot fail unpredictably.
In every environment where AI is being deployed to take autonomous action in the physical world, there is a layer of software beneath the model that has to perform exactly as specified, every single time, without exception. That layer is what QNX does.
And as AI moves from digital interfaces into physical systems , the demand for that layer is accelerating. The Physical AI Thesis Giamatteo framed physical AI, autonomous robots, intelligent edge devices, and industrial automation, as one of QNX's most significant growth accelerators on the call.
Design wins across robotics, industrial automation, and medical devices are already converting into backlog. In Q4 FY2026 alone, QNX secured a significant win for its General Embedded Development Platform in industrial automation controls for a major North American OEM.
Johnson & Johnson selected QNX OS for Safety to power a new AI-driven heart pump, one of the most specific examples of QNX serving as the operating foundation for an AI system in a life-critical medical device.
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