“Technology advancement should not be the privilege of the minority, but should benefit all mankind,” said Jian Qin, General Manager of China Unicom Group. “We will advance AI to benefit everyone.” 

He was speaking at an innovation summit co-hosted at MWC 25 by China Unicom and Huawei. The theme of the summit was ‘5G-A Empowering, AI Transforming, Digital Living’.

Louise Easterbrook, CFO at GSMA, noted that for many years AI was used in the background to improve operations. Now, with generative AI, the possibilities have increased. China Unicom provides a great illustration of this. Last year, the company launched its large language model and today it has 37 industry-specific models, she said. They cover industries as diverse as fashion, healthcare and urban governance. 

“We are halfway through the 5G story and at the beginning of the AI story,” she said. “It feels like a moment in time.” 

Yang Chaobin, Director of the Board, CEO of the ICT Business Group, Huawei, revealed how China Unicom and Huawei are collaborating to deliver unified AI services that are both reliable and secure. With huge growth in AI traffic expected, he emphasised the importance of having synergy between AI and the network. He commended China Unicom as the first carrier to achieve high-throughput, lossless transition over 200km, which enables more powerful AI use cases.

He said that Huawei and China Unicom will collaborate closely to develop an AI cloud service platform for individuals and homes. The companies previously released the AI cloud phone during the Asian Winter Games in Harbin and launched the AI agent Tone. This agent integrates multiple applications and understands user intent, to act as the user’s smart ‘digital twin’.

China Unicom also provides an open platform for partners, so they can more easily incorporate third-party models and applications, such as DeepSeek.

“Carriers must consider how to transition from a communications service provider to a technology service provider,” said Wang Limin, Deputy General Manager and Senior Vice President of China Unicom. “China Unicom is taking active steps to implement a strategy for converged innovation by promoting the integration of the network, technology and services.”

China Unicom’s AI Home Cloud, which provides unified access to the smart home, is a powerful example of this integration. It has a consolidated architecture called AltoC&H to accelerate the delivery of AI capabilities; a unified experience with AI agents able to work across apps and devices; unified AI and network capabilities; and converged data across domestic applications. The AI service platform, called C&H Converged Agent, is based on Unicom Cloud.

China Unicom describes its stack as 1+1+N, because there is one converged architecture (AltoC&H), one converged AI agent (C&H) and N (any number) of converged services. They use a cloud operating system to deliver integrated services across large, medium and small screens.

At the summit, China Unicom announced that it will use AI agents to upgrade its Home Cloud and converge AI across individual mobile and home use cases.

Hao Liqian, Deputy General Manager and Senior Vice President (Government & Enterprise Line) of China Unicom, said that AI is estimated to account for 3.5% of global GDP by 2030. He shared China Unicom’s vision for AI, which is for it to be as accessible as water, for intelligence to be everywhere, and to bridge the gap between data and knowledge with computing.

As an example of network innovation, he introduced AINet, which enables efficient data transmission to computing centres, remote AI training, and wide area network (WAN)-based distributed collaborative training. The performance achieved is impressive: TB-level data can travel over 3,000km in minutes, and distributed training has been achieved over a lossless network at 300km distances.

The summit also saw the launch of China Unicom’s AI Unites All plan, which was celebrated with applause in the auditorium. One of the themes running through the summit was the importance of collaboration and, to that end, Dr Meng Shusen, chairman and CEO of China Unicom Global, issued an invitation to China Unicom’s Global Partners Meeting, which will take place on the first day of MWC Shanghai.