5G-, AI-Driven Change Will Affect All Industries, Conference Speakers Say

Driven by 5G, technology is changing how all industries conduct business and companies must adjust, speakers said during a keynote panel Tuesday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. “Technology is driving massive changes across multiple industries,” said Mohamed Kande, vice chair PwC US and the firm's global chairman-elect. How, when and where companies operate, what their biggest products are and how they serve customers are all changing, he said. “No one is spared,” he said. Kande noted that 65% of the companies on the Fortune Global 500 list in 1995 no longer exist -- they either got acquired or went bankrupt. PwC recently surveyed global CEOs, 45% of whom said their businesses won’t be viable in 10 years, Kande added. Companies have to “reinvent” their business models, he said. “It is not about doing the same thing” or “about becoming more efficient,” he said: Change is about “how companies make money differently, how they serve their customers in new ways, get into new products and services and even new industries.” A big force for change is 5G, which will make the IoT “a reality,” Kande said. “Think about all the data and insights that come out of 5G for companies to run their businesses better,” he said. We will see “an explosion of the cloud” because of how 5G is being deployed, and that will mean more reliance on AI, he predicted. Step one is being connected, said Antonio Neri, CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise. “Without connectivity, you can’t digitize, you can’t automate … and you can’t deliver these new experiences” for customers, he said. Neri said Hewlett Packard made a “big bet” on investing on the network edge. Companies can’t put all their data in the same location, whether on premises or in the cloud, he said. “We decided to build a hybrid cloud experience with the cloud principles in mind,” he said. For most companies, data is “the most valuable asset” they have, and at some point companies will have to report their owned data in financial balance sheets, he said. AI is “the next big inflection point” for the internet, predicted Rami Rahim, CEO of Juniper Networks. Companies need “bold thinking” to capture all the potential AI offers, he said.