AI is gaining an unrivalled momentum worldwide, profoundly reshaping telecom networks, which are essential infrastructure for society. AI is also driving an exponential surge of data in networks, which propels their growth to unprecedented scales. At the same time, AI has become an important topic of telecom network innovation, as the entire telecom world is focusing on AI-Native networks, aiming to bring AI to core processes.

With this in mind, China Mobile’s Executive Vice President, Li Huidi, delivered a keynote speech at MWC 2025 titled "5G-A Leads Mobile AI Era." In his presentation, Li explained that remarkable progress had been made in three areas:

Leading information infrastructure. China Mobile has the world's largest 5G and fiber broadband networks and also fully cloud-based 4G/5G converged core networks, in addition to rapidly growing computing power. This leading information infrastructure is a solid support for digital-intelligent transformation across industries.

Innovation-enabled information service systems. As an innovation-guided firm, China Mobile has come a long way in translating innovation into differentiated business competitiveness, especially in 5G-Advanced. For example, the company has 90,000 5G-Advanced 3CC CA cells and 450,000 RedCap sites, and is also the first operator to bring Network Data Analytics Function (NWDAF) to 5G-Advanced for experience assurance. Its wireless AI applications are making a huge difference across its networks to enhance user experience.

Digital-intelligent transformation towards high level autonomous networks. China Mobile has brought to life end-to-end digital-intelligent operation and maintenance automation, focusing on optimizing its processes by combining AI-based innovation and data (as a new productive factor) to create more out of networks. Level 4 (L4) autonomous service provisioning and network change monitoring have already been realized to make network operations more efficient and cost-effective.

Li highlighted two special achievements in his presentation, which focused on AI-native mobile networks enabling tiered quality guarantee and optimization automation; and autonomous networks for fully-connected factories and connected vehicles.

The innovation and development towards a digital-intelligent future would not be achieved without global collaboration. Regarding this, Li put forward two proposals. First, end-to-end promotion is necessary for autonomous networks and 5G-Advanced. Li believes this will help amplify the impact of the telecom industry across production, everyday life, and governance. Second, close collaboration with both standards and industry organizations is key to improved AI governance in the telecom industry. By adding intelligence to information and telecom networks, the telecom industry contributes to "AI for good".

At this summit, China Mobile, alongside GSMA, TM Forum, GSA, and Huawei, unveiled eight major use cases of L4 autonomous networks and five innovation achievements of 5G-Advanced based on its AI+NETWORK innovation program.

China Mobile has the world's largest telecom networks and user bases. This confirms why it first started digital-intelligent transformation in the telecom industry back in 2019, with the goal of promoting the converged innovation of networks and AI towards high level autonomous networks. This pioneering exploration has now reaped fruitful results, delivering significant improvements in its quality, efficiency, and business returns. Now, it has become the first network operator to bring L4 autonomous networks to eight key scenarios, with four for ToB service provisioning and the others for network change monitoring.

L4 network autonomy is available for ToB service provisioning, including 5G private network, cloud private line, data private line, and Internet private line. AI makes delivery faster and agiler for these services, by enabling end-to-end automation to completely replace manual operations and improving the accuracy of dumb resource identification.

L4 network autonomy is also supported for monitoring changes across core networks, network clouds, transport networks, and IP networks to ensure secure network operations. End-to-end automation is realized for impact analysis and operation monitoring. Digital twins are introduced to make network change solutions visualized, customizable, and pre-verifiable to ensure zero change-caused faults.

China Mobile has been dedicating efforts to promote the technology and network development of 5G-Advanced. A number of achievements have been made to accelerate its commercial development.

China Mobile has also been actively promoting 5G-Advanced development, and it has made remarkable progress, from the technology innovation and commercial expansion. It has also been advancing digital-intelligent network O&M transformation based on network autonomy. Looking ahead, the company will continue to work with the entire industry ecosystem to stimulate and scale up the converged development of 5G-Advanced and AI to inject new vitality to the digital economy.