On Day 3 of MWC2025, James Chen, President of Carrier Business, Huawei, gave a speech focused on how AI innovation will drive value creation.
With the rapid development of 5G, cloud computing and artificial intelligence, consumers and enterprises are demanding new digital and intelligent services. The traditional business models of the telecom industry are facing profound changes, and Chen underlined three main aspects that should be reshaped.
Firstly, operators can – and indeed should – reshape their business models around value creation, expanding proactively from connectivity into more digital and intelligent services. They also need to reshape operations and maintenance, utilizing AI and Big Data to optimize them, and reshape infrastructure by advancing the integration of multi-element synergetic networks to provide strong support for innovative services.
One example is different models for differentiated experience monetization. With consumer services evolving, businesses can be impacted by 5G network congestion – for example, a livestreamer selling products during their stream. If this becomes an issue, the network can automatically send a VIP package recommendation to the user, and once they accept the offer their livestreaming business is guaranteed immediately, with ‘VIP Assurance’ displayed on the device. This is a case of operators monetizing experience.
To achieve this business model, operators firstly need to apply AI technologies to recommend the right package for the users, and then they can dynamically adjust users’ bandwidth. The differentiated experience monetization enables operators to find more opportunities in more scenarios, such as gaming, business traveling and hotspot areas.
Moving onto intelligent homes, Chen detailed how operators in Korea and China are establishing a unified intelligent home entry with an AI agent inside. The agent serves as a gateway for accessing different intelligent home devices and AI-based services, interpreting the intentions of each family member and invoking the right applications in the cloud. For example, in the instance that an elderly relative falls, the home Wi-Fi router can automatically detect it, recognize that they need help, and alert family members. Operators can use different services to meet different needs; in this way, by bundling a high-speed fiber network with an AI Agent that can invoke various cloud services, operators can begin to shift from being home broadband providers to AI services providers.
Chen explained that while AI provides opportunities in toC and toH business, it also supports digital transformation for other industries. For example, An operator from North Africa has used its existing mobile money service as an entry point for SMEs, and is utilizing its cloud as a platform to support digital transformation of vertical industries – this was the key to developing B2B business. Its cloud was built to meet the needs of local industry and integrates both local and global partners into a unified one-stop digitization platform. It provides developers with a low code environment featuring 1-click onboarding of new applications. In this way, operators can expand from connectivity into a broad range of cloud services to help local industries bridge the digital intelligence gap.
Traditional operations and maintenance also need AI-based innovation to support techco transformation. Interruption to a wireless service can be identified in under three minutes, with an AI agent assisting the field engineer throughout the repair process. The whole process is automatic, thanks to the telecom foundation model. Without it, network troubleshooting involves entire network elements and many engineers, but with the model, the troubleshooting is fully automated with an AI agent, and the Field Maintenance Engineer carrying out the repairs is fully supported by an AI copilot. This improves the user experience, reducing the provisioning time and troubleshooting time, and helping to optimize resource allocation efficiency.
Outlining how operators can adopt this capability, Chen explained that the first step is for operators to build a digital twin of their network and its services, then integrate this with a large telecom model. Finally, they should construct and implement knowledge-based automatic O&M operations into their daily activities.
Chen explained some major changes that will be required in the sphere of infrastructure, noting that data centers will need to be upgraded to support both high-performance training and fast inference. The traditionally north-south traffic flow is being joined by an east-west flow, and network capabilities are evolving from best effort to deterministic experience. Chen outlined how a future-oriented architecture should consider the various layers of these changes:
Intelligent connections: the network should evolve to support deterministic experience and lossless connection.
Intelligent clouds: build distributed and diversified computing power to provide cloud-based services and intelligent computing services.
All elements collaboration, from planning to operation: the operators should consider collaborative construction and resource scheduling between cloud and network, and between network and computing power.
The development of AI will accelerate techco transformation, and Chen explained how Huawei can help operators from three perspectives.
Firstly, it provides AI-boosted business, which can help operators to enrich their service offerings such as connectivity + X to SMEs, Cloud platform for large industries, and a mobile money Super-app.
Next, it supports AI-enabled operation. With Huawei’s telecom foundation model operators can enable existing NOC and SOC with AI Agents and Copilots.
Finally, it helps evolve to AI-centric Infrastructure. Operators can leverage Huawei’s technology leadership to help build a synergetic infrastructure with flexible resource scheduling to meet future service requirements.
The AI era has arrived, and the best time to act is now. Chen stated Huawei’s belief that transformation is not the goal - value creation is the essence. Huawei is willing to work together with operators and partners to accelerate the transformation to techco through joint innovation and efforts, continuously creating greater value.
