Telcos attending this year’s Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona won’t need reminding that despite their size and influence, that their revenues are growing slowly and profits are under pressure.
It’s no surprise that in common with the rest of the IT industry, the telco news pouring out of MWC is almost exclusively centred on AI with announcements that either help them to increase the efficiency of core activities or promise to create new revenue streams.
Artificial network intelligence
Among the big stories from this week’s MWC was the announcement of the Open Telecom AI Platform, described as a central intelligence layer for network services integrating AI and automation across all network operations. The platform, a collaboration between chip-maker AMD, Cisco, Nokia and Indian telco group Jio, will encompass multiple LLMs, open APIs, agentic AI and machine learning to increase network intelligence.
“By harnessing agentic AI across all telco layers, we are building a multimodal, multidomain orchestrated workflow platform that redefines efficiency, intelligence and security for the telecom industry,” Mathew Oommen, group CEO of Reliance Jio, told TechTarget.
“This initiative goes beyond automation – it’s about enabling AI-driven, autonomous networks that adapt in real time, enhance user experiences, and create new service and revenue opportunities across the digital ecosystem,” Oommen added.
Fear of missing out
Behind the predictable AI-with-everything rhetoric are more pressing concerns about the survival of operators, according to analysts.
In a recent piece for Computer Weekly, Edwin Lin, principal consultant at Omdia wrote: “AI is a catalyst for new revenue streams, from personalised customer experiences to IoT and 5G-driven services…Telcos that hold back risk missing out on emerging opportunities, while their competitors build innovative offerings and gain first-mover advantages.”
In a similar announcement, Huawei launched what it described as industry’s “first AI core network”, representing what it claims is a transformative shift from AI-powered to AI-native infrastructure. The AI Core Network will be an autonomous generative network capable of self-optimisation and self-managed operations. Huawei said the network would enable anything to anything intelligent connectivity with the integration of AI-driven agents, terminals, and scenarios. “With AI-driven mobile core networks, Level 4 autonomous networking is now within reach to provide lower-cost operation but, more importantly, a more resilient core,” stated Dave Bolan, Research Director at Dell’Oro Group.
Transforming network operations
Multinational consulting and services provider Tech Mahindra is also banking on AI to transform network operations. It is using Nvidia’s AI Enterprise software, Meta’s Llama 3.1 8b instruct model and AWS cloud infrastructure to enable telcos to turn conventional networks into fully autonomous networks with its snappily named Multi-Modal Network Operations Large Language Model for Telcos,
Nvidia’s ubiquitous AI technology also features in an announcement by consulting group, which announced the EY Telecom.ai agentic solution, a suite of artificial intelligence (AI) agents for telecommunication providers that will operate across the critical functions of finance, network, customer service and content life cycle management. Telecom.ai is an AI-powered solution that leverages the full-stack Nvidia AI platform.
AI – the solution to AI problems
A pressing concern for network operators and their customers is how to use AI to address the challenges AI is expected to create. Top of the list is enhancing performance to enable networks to withstand the pressure from data-intensive and highly distributed AI workloads.
For example, HPE claimed an industry first with a switch that offers a “solution to embed precision timing into the network fabric for AI workloads and private 5G experiences.”
Meanwhile, Samsung and AWS demonstrated how the mobile radio access network (RAN) can use AI to plan, deploy, operate and optimise networks using Amazon Bedrock, AWS’s AI networking platform.
Despite plenty of rhetoric about user benefits, most MWC announcements were really focused on the immediate interests of network operators and equipment providers – ensuring that their services and products for the AI onslaught without multiplying the complexity and costs of AI-capable infrastructure.
AI for all?
Chinese telecoms equipment maker ZTE had more to say about what this might mean for customers. In common with other exhibitors, ZTE was keen to showcase its vision – or what it called a “full-scenario intelligent ecosystem with AI-driven interactions connecting person, vehicle and home to deliver multiple values”. Beneath this somewhat generic statement, ZTE sees devices, particularly the smartphone, as the delivery vehicles for applied AI.
According to Ni Fei, SVP of ZTE and president of ZTE Mobile Devices said: “By seamlessly connecting multi-modal architectures with advanced AI LLMs, we are transforming how users interact with technology across photography, gaming, translation, and AI generated content.”
“It is still early days, but there is no question that AI will play a growing role in the future, impacting devices, behaviors, and ultimately the RAN network ” commented Stefan Pongratz, Vice President, Dell’Oro Group.
The company is betting on Google’s Gemini model, which will be integrated with all new Nubia products – the smartphone maker spun out of ZTE more than a decade ago – with Google Cloud infrastructure doing the heavy lifting.
Transforming PR
The thousands of announcements made at MWC covered a wide spectrum from AI network infrastructure to weird and wonderful devices. While AI may not yet have had the transformative impact on business, society and human life that its proponents are predicting, for now at least it has had a transformative effect on PR.
Almost every vendor had an AI story to tell. Although AI has been “emerging” for decades, the rate of its perceived transition from niche to mainstream over the past two years has been breathtaking. It will be interesting to see how many of the visions, roadmaps and strategies on show this year survive the transition to revenue-generating products and services in the next two years.
