AI's Emergence Was Biggest Theme at Mobile World Congress

The recently concluded Mobile World Congress in Barcelona was the largest show since 2019, with 5G and AI dominating discussions, panelists said Thursday during a TelecomTV webinar. “The show was all about AI,” said Sandeep Phadke, senior vice president at tech provider Tech Mahindra. The show was also “very grounded,” he added. “It was about how, do I make sure that, from a telecom operator’s standpoint, we are able to address the costs to serve customers, the time to market, and where do we get the new set of revenues?” he said. Carriers are “starting to position” themselves on how they will bring their customers AI, which is “an important turning point,” said Andrew Border, head-product for telco solutions at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Carriers potentially have a “massive advantage" in AI because of "their globally deployed networks,” he said: “You don’t want to be pulling this AI data all back centrally.” The show also demonstrated that the wireless industry is “coming back really strongly,” he said. “There was a lot of AI -- you could not escape AI,” said Salman Tariq, vice president-sales at software provider Optiva. Every tech player had AI as a theme, he said. There was “a good mix of AI fantasy versus real use cases,” he added. “We are now starting to talk about real-life challenges of AI,” Tariq said. MWC is transforming from a “core telecom” show to a tech show, Tariq said. “You could see a lot of adjacent industries coming in and using telco as a platform to build solutions, to add value in their ecosystems,” he said. AI was “omnipresent,” mentioned in every discussion and spread throughout the show floor, said David Boswarthick, director-new technologies at the European Telecommunications Standards Institute. How AI is defined “wasn’t too clear,” he noted. Most of the AI presentations didn’t focus on how carriers are using the technology, he said. But most other discussions were ”very grounded,” Boswarthick said. The focus was on what 5G is doing now and how we can get value now, what customers need, he said. “It was a very now event, as opposed to a more future-looking event.” AI is “finally” emerging as a “significant technology trend,” said Paul Miller, chief technology officer at open radio access network company Wind River. “We’re early in the adoption curve” for AI, he said. His company is deploying AI as part of ORAN, which can save providers money, he said. The meeting saw packed, standing-room only crowds for the first time since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, he said. “It was a very, very hot show,” he said. The “AI World Congress” should replace MWC as the show's name, said Francis Haysom, principal analyst at Appledore Research. While "there is, obviously, a degree of hype there,” some discussions focused on “AI as an enabler of automation in networks,” he said.