The global ICT industry gathers in Barcelona starting next Monday for the traditional Catalan winter meeting, until Thursday, February 29th. GSMA expects to welcome 95,000 attendees at the Fira venue, where nobody doubts that Generative AI will be the main protagonist. The weeks leading up to the congress have shown signs and previews of innovations around this type of intelligence and its impact on mobile networks, particularly in the enterprise business, and its contribution to the challenging monetization of 5G deployments.

Among the companies predicting a crucial role for Generative AI in the messages of MWC is AWS, which will have a large space at the Fira, on the upper floor of the South Entrance. The deployment includes an exhibition area for the interactive home of the future, another for industrial use cases, and one more for Telcos' journey in their transition to TechCos, among other sectors.

During a virtual event as a preview to MWC, Chivas Nambiar, General Manager of AWS Global Telecommunications Business Unit, predicted four key trends for the telco sector: Generative AI, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), APIs over the network, and network transformation.

The telco transformation to be discussed in Barcelona includes cloudification through RAN, Core, IMS, and OSS-BSS; unified automation, orchestration, and Generative AI; and reduced Opex.

In smartphones as well. The role of AI in smartphones will also take center stage. The German operator Deutsche Telekom previewed its presentation at MWC of a visionary AI concept, developed in collaboration with Qualcomm and Brain.ai: it involves the AI assistant replacing numerous apps on a smartphone. This assistant will function as a concierge, capable of "understanding goals and taking care of details," assured the German telco.

Efforts are also underway to develop an interface through which AI could predict the user's next task.