MWC25 review: AI a big deal, or AI? Big deal!

Cerillion Product Director, Brian Coombs, is back from Barcelona, with a stomach full of pintxos and AI on the brain, for his usual round-up from MWC. What impressed him most at this year’s flagship telecoms industry event?

Regular readers of my MWC blogs may remember my surprise that AI didn’t dominate the agenda at last year’s show.

Well, it would appear I was just ahead of the game, and this year, everyone has caught up – AI was everywhere.

Everything was AI-powered, AI-driven or agentic. Network automation and AI operations had been the key focus 12 months ago, but here, AI in software and AI agents were the main push. Some companies even seemed to be competing to see who could mention “AI” on their stands the most – SK Telecom had it no less than 32 times!

Now don’t get me wrong – I’m a firm believer that we’re at the start of a pretty fundamental shift in how AI affects our everyday life, but there’s also undoubtedly still a significant amount of AI-washing going on, seemingly in the hope that AI will save telcos from slowing growth.

It was heartening to hear one industry analyst say that our automated product creation from a screenshot of an operator’s website was still the best live AI demo he’d seen, but that was from six months ago! So it does beg the question – why isn’t everyone focusing on the benefits AI can deliver now, rather than just showing it as a potential?

Outside of AI, what other trends did I notice? One annoying one was the increase in the vlogger zombies shuffling around the show floor. There’s always been a lot of press there, but so many people were just wandering around with a phone held in front of them, videoing everything they saw, and more and more lugging around serious AV equipment, making it even harder to navigate the exhibition than usual!

Almost at odds with this, I found this year’s show far less consumer-oriented than previous years. Sure, all the big mobile manufacturers like Samsung, ZTE, etc. were there, but there were no niche players, far fewer consumer IoT devices, very little in the way of VR (maybe it just needs a few more billion dollars, Meta?), and far more network hardware manufacturers than previously.

This ties in with the other noticeable trend this year, and that’s the rise and rise of China. I read somewhere that 30% of the exhibitors were from China, but at times it seemed much higher than that.

You have the behemoth that is Huawei of course – their stand (or city?) now takes up about 75% of Hall 1 – but it was the sheer number of companies selling all these bits of network equipment, that I’m sure do very important things, and every one of them was from China.

On the handset front, the new thing was updated foldables, now with three screens! The main players here were Samsung and Huawei, though similar to the first release of these, Samsung was significantly thicker and hidden behind a glass cabinet, while the Huawei one could be played with and was impressively thin. I fully expect the razor blades war to come to handsets and the next one will come with five screens!

Other than that, nothing really stood out to me about the handsets; better cameras, more AI, not really going to excite anyone.

Gadget wise, we saw lots of robots running around – dogbots have been a familiar sight for a few years, but they were joined this year by a number of humanoid companions, mostly from Unitree, who have been releasing lots of exciting-looking videos recently.

Indeed, their motion is very impressive, smoothly responding to handshake requests and waves, doing handstands and the like – however I was disappointed to spot the guy hiding behind a column with a remote control, so not so smart at all!

One company who did impress me was XPANCEO, who are in the process of taking VR / AR glasses to their next logical state, miniaturising the technology into contact lenses. There’s still some work to do to get the chip small enough – they reckon 1mm² will be practically invisible – but the potential is definitely there, not only with AR, but also as a health device, sampling the fluid on the eye for insulin, vitamins and various other health signals. Exciting times ahead!

Finally, a shoutout must go to whoever sells those holographic fans to stand designers, they must’ve been working overtime this year – they were everywhere!

On the Cerillion stand, we had a great show, demoing our latest GenAI features of course, and our new composable Self Service, receiving an enthusiastic reception from everyone who saw them. It was definitely the busiest it has ever been in terms of visits from customers, but also plenty of great prospects and partners that we look forward to working with in the future. I really enjoyed the discussions and debates with you all there, and well into the night at our tapas party.

See you again next year!

If you didn’t get chance to visit us at MWC, then contact us now to find out more about our GenAI-powered BSS/OSS suite and to book your own personalised demo.