Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:08):
Four days of AI noise at MWC can grind an ageing man down, but I've gathered some thoughts and identified four key takeaways from this show. And after some consideration, I've got them all to start with the letter C. The first is collaboration, absolutely as old as the hills and talked about for years, but we're seeing some unexpected and enhanced co-working patterns in the telecoms ecosystem. The unexpected is exemplified by Ericsson and Nokia, bitter rivals who find themselves not only batting for the same team at the Trusted Tech Alliance that was announced last month, but also agreeing to pool resources to help telcos with their autonomous network plans. With Ericsson agreeing to join its rival's service management and orchestration marketplace, and Nokia becoming a member of Ericsson's rApp ecosystem – has hell frozen over? But in terms of enhanced collaboration, hats off to the GSMA for its initiatives such as Open Gateway, launched at MWC23, and which has delivered measurable benefits to the industry.

(01:16):
At its latest effort, Open Telco AI, which is aiming to help bring context to AI-native telco developments. There's our second C, context, specifically as related to the deployment of agentic AI by network operators. Gaining telco-specific context for agents is a major driver behind the formation of that Open Telco AI initiative, as was highlighted by Deutsche Telekom and Google Cloud during a TelecomTV-hosted discussion on agentic AI in relation to their co-developed Minder, which stands for Multiagentic Intelligent Network Diagnostics and Remediation, in case you were wondering. And it was also cited by Tech Mahindra as a key feature of its new telco network operations reasoning agent developed with Nvidia and was at the heart of Totogi's pitch to telco customers here in Barcelona and cited by many more. Now, one of the notable things about the Deutsche Telekom and Google Cloud collaboration, apart from contextual agentic AI, is the relatively rapid pace at which they've gone from concept to trial to impactful real-world deployment of their initial agentic AI deployment, RAN Guardian, and then built on that with the upcoming multi-domain, multi-agent Minder.

(02:33):
That's an example of my third C, celerity. What the heck is that word you might ask? Well, it means rapidity of motion. It begins with a C, so I'm running with it. My point is that telcos, long derided for being laggards, appear to have finally got the message they need to speed the frick up, otherwise they're going to dig an even bigger hole for themselves than they're already in. They can't rely on cost cutting and inflation to shore up their financials forever. Now, are operators accelerating their pace of development and activity across the board? No, they're not. But there are signs that in key areas such as AI-related developments, what previously would have taken three or four years is now taking way less, sometimes just months, and they're not imploding as a result. More celerity, please. My final C is just a reminder that the telcos have in their armoury something that the whole world needs and which no one else does better, and that's connectivity.

(03:29):
That's got to count for something, right?