Industry Thought Leadership

Over the past five years, commercial 5G has achieved remarkable success and made an unprecedented impact on the global mobile industry. It has extended the breadth of global services, delivered higher speeds for better experience, and deepened digital transformation around the world.

5G continues to develop apace, with the first standards release for 5G-Advanced or 5.5G officially “frozen” this past June. More than 60 carriers and partners have also announced commercial 5.5G deployment.

Now, the mobile AI era is on the horizon. It will usher in three seismic changes.

The mobile AI era is on the horizon. It will usher in seismic changes.

First, human-computer interaction will shift from being touch-based to multimodal. This means the ways we interact with computers will extend to natural language, gestures, and emotions, delivering on-demand, 24/7 experience.

Second, content generation will be revolutionized. Previously, people acquired information mainly through search engines. In the future, such information will be generated by AI. Information production will be no longer about prefabrication, but about customization, making comprehensive and tailored real-time services available.

Third, mobile devices will go from being smartphones to being AI terminal assistants and embodied AI. This means mobile devices will become portals to seamless AI.

These huge changes will revitalize society and create tremendous opportunities for the mobile industry.

Coping with a surge in data use
Thanks to graphical interaction, mobile data traffic growth outpaced Moore's Law for the past 10 years. Specifically, [user data consumption] Data of Usage (DoU) has grown by 125 times over the last decade, meaning it has doubled every 17 months. In the mobile AI era, generative content will become a primary method of information acquisition, replacing retrieval and increasing interaction efficiency by 100 times.

AI-generated content (AIGC) will also facilitate the generation of content in different formats, including 3D and spatial video, increasing content volume by 100 times. In addition, a large number of mini-models built into devices will start to collaborate with foundation models on the cloud in real time. These phenomena will drive a new wave of explosive data growth, outpacing Moore's Law once again.

The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) will make driving safer, easier, and more enjoyable. Intelligent cockpits will create new driving experiences and gigabit network experience will better support vehicle-mounted smart assistants, video streaming on multiple screens, extended reality (XR) applications, and other requirements. This will make vehicles a mobile third space suited for both leisure and work.

In the future, everyone will have an AI assistant that runs on their smartphones, glasses, and devices.

Leave the driving to AI
At the same time, intelligent driving will disrupt traditional driving systems. Every month, 100 GB of driving data will be uploaded to train the intelligent driving system, making models, perception, and responses more accurate in dynamic driving environments. In addition, millisecond-level V2X will provide reliable and stable driving strategies in real time.

The Internet of Everything (IoE) will be also greatly expanded in the mobile AI era. As machines are more able to think and move around like humans, network connections will expand from humans to silicon-based digital humans, which will create 10 billion new connected AI assistants and workers.

For individuals, everyone will have an AI assistant in the future that runs on their smartphones, glasses, and AI devices. AI assistants will move beyond just being tools and become our companions, responding to requirements in all scenarios like work, play, and learning in real time.

Intelligent factories and logistics
In industry, every smart factory will have an AI brain, enabling AI workers to deeply integrate into production activities. AI workers will be capable of self-learning and making accurate responses, improving the quality and efficiency of the end-to-end process from production and maintenance to quality inspection and logistics.

There will be so many new connected AI assistants and workers, tens of billions, that they will eventually outnumber the connections of people and spearhead a new era of human-machine integration.
The mobile AI era will present tremendous new opportunities.

Against this backdrop, the whole industry needs to work closely together and make the most of what this era has to offer. 5.5G is a key pillar of the mobile AI era, so Huawei will continue to accelerate its development and work with carriers and industry partners to create new commercial value. This will require joint efforts in the following two areas.

To fully embrace AI, improving network efficiency is imperative.

Laying the groundwork for a mobile AI world
The first is Networks for AI, which means using networks to fuel the development of AI in order to lay a solid foundation for the mobile AI era. There will be a wide array of services in the future, which will, in turn, raise higher requirements for network capabilities such as large uplink and downlink bandwidths and low latencies. To meet the growing demand for the Internet of People (IoP) and IoV, we will need to accelerate the evolution of all frequency bands to support 5.5G experience, fully unleash the value of each frequency band, and build a foundation for a superior network experience.

The second area that requires joint effort is AI for Networks, which means using AI to empower networks and enable network productivity surges on all fronts. To fully embrace AI, improving network O&M efficiency is imperative. Our Telecom Foundation Model, for instance, accelerates the evolution of networks to L4 Autonomous Networks (ANs) and provides two types of applications: role-based copilots and scenario-specific agents. Copilots improve the productivity of different roles by providing Q&As related to professional knowledge and assisted O&M. Agents, on the other hand, can understand user intent and orchestrate tasks to automatically resolve issues in complex scenarios.

I believe that over the next decade, we will fully embrace mobile AI. The intelligent world is fast approaching, and 5.5G will serve as a cornerstone of future development. As always, Huawei will remain committed to working with all industry players to seize the tremendous opportunities presented by the mobile AI era and build a fully-connected, intelligent world.