Image: www.broadpeak.tv
Mobile World Congress is the dream trade show. Lovely spring weather, amazing food, culture all around and somehow 100,000 lanyards glide through the cavernous halls of the Fira Gran Via. It’s a real palette cleanser to the perpetual dusk of CES and Vegas’ strangely patterned carpets.
For years the energy around MWC centred around amazing smartphone innovations and serious network revolution. But for many, excitement died down as progress plateaued—the iPhone has looked the same since 2019 and the hype is yet to build for 6G.
AI has been the main technology headline driver for recent shows. This year, its evolution into AI Agents is the main show theme. If the big tech boom of 2010 onwards was apps to replace your mum (drive me places, bring me food, do my chores), it seems the future we’re creating now is personal valets that organise our lives (while we presumably walk elegantly into restaurants with our jackets slung over our shoulders). It’s a compelling vision as laid out by Open AI’s board chair at a fireside chat on the showfloor. Just don’t look too closely at the job ‘disruption’ all this will cause.
It’s easy to overlook how important MWC is to the core infrastructure powering our world. Big strides are being made by carriers and software providers to install AI that is able to automate network issue detection and resolution. And the Internet of Things is back having a moment as utilities, manufacturers and agriculture use AI combined with sensors, cameras and drones to monitor and improve operations.
But mainly, people love wandering around the booths to find the weird and wacky tech. WIRED has a great rundown of this year’s offering and it reminded me of my first MWC where journalists couldn’t get enough of a Samsung smartphone with a projector embedded at the top. This year’s supreme oddity is a phone with an extra screen at the top that has an AI avatar of the user. It collects all of your data, for what use? No one is quite sure.
But the more mainstream gadgets, paired with really interesting camera innovations and actual (non-Gen) AI deployments in the enterprise show that genuine progress is being made. It seems that we’re through the Gartner hype cycle for many technologies and are well on the way to real-world applications that move us forward.
