For decades, the mobile telecom industry measured its success in coverage maps, bandwidth benchmarks, and subscriber counts. That conversation has changed. As AI moves from research labs into hospitals, classrooms, and city systems, networks are being asked to evolve beyond connectivity, supporting the growing demands of AI across industries.
The pace of this shift has been staggering. Compared with 2025, the world has changed immensely in just twelve months. AI has moved forward at an extraordinary pace — faster, deeper, and more tangible than many expected — and its impact is now being felt not only in cutting-edge research labs, but across hospitals, schools, cities, and countless real-world operating environments.
When we look back at the past year, one thing stands out: AI has truly stepped into the real world. It is no longer only a system that can read, analyze, or generate knowledge; it is now able to act, to collaborate, to make decisions — and increasingly, to deliver real and measurable outcomes in production scenarios. AI is progressing from understanding the world, to experiencing it, and now to reshaping it. This marks a new chapter — one in which AI becomes a core driver of productivity and growth across the global economy.
For operators, this transformation is especially meaningful. Over the past year, we have seen operators around the world accelerate their evolution from connectivity providers to builders of digital and intelligent ecosystems. The deep integration of AI, cloud, network, edge and devices has created new expectations for networks: to be more intelligent, more responsive, and more capable of carrying the distributed, real-time AI workloads that modern industries and societies demand. This convergence is transforming networks into intelligent collaborative systems, placing operators at the very heart of industry intelligence.
The industry's focus today is how to turn transformation into executable architecture and scalable practice. We will look at top-level frameworks, end-to-end enterprise solutions, and compute-and-network models that unlock agility — alongside the latest "5G + AI" practices. The goal is clear: actionable blueprints and real access to ecosystems, so strategy becomes deployment, and deployment becomes business value.
What truly distinguishes the past year is how quickly AI has begun to demonstrate impact at scale. In healthcare, multimodal models are assisting clinicians across diagnostic workflows and care coordination. In education, AI is enabling adaptive learning and assessment support that benefit both students and teachers. In public services, city-scale platforms are enhancing citizen services, emergency response, and operational resilience. The common thread is clear: AI is no longer a pilot-stage technology — it has already become a new productive force.
Research from the GSMA in 2025 reinforces this point. Across 32 countries, 10 industries, and more than five thousand enterprises, companies indicated they would allocate about 10 percent of their revenue to digital transformation between now and 2030 — with AI, together with 5G connectivity and devices, representing the largest and most strategic share of that investment. Over 90 percent of enterprises now view generative AI as critical to their digital transformation. AI has moved beyond a technology advantage for any single sector; it is a cross-industry structural trend and an emerging source of competitive strength. For the next five years, it will remain the most certain and most impactful area of digital investment.
In parallel, the GSMA is working with the ecosystem to shape end-to-end AI-for-Enterprise blueprints, promote compute-and-network convergence, and share global "5G + AI" benchmarks — translating strategic vision into scalable implementation across the ecosystem.
As AI continues its rapid evolution, it also reshapes expectations for networks. AI computation increasingly flows across cloud, network, edge and device. This means operators are becoming the orchestrators of a distributed AI fabric that industries will rely upon. The network of the future will not be defined solely by bandwidth or latency, but by its ability to perceive, understand and collaborate with AI systems running across all layers. This marks a profound transformation for telecom — and opens a new era of opportunity for operators' B2B growth.
Of course, no single company or technology can achieve this alone. At-scale industry intelligence requires collaboration across the entire ecosystem, with shared standards, shared platforms, and shared innovation spaces. One of the most important learnings from the past year is that ecosystems — not isolated technologies — will determine who leads the next phase of AI-powered growth. Therefore, the industry needs to bring together the world's top research leaders, network innovators, equipment pioneers, and digital transformation practitioners from around the world to learn from global benchmark practices — and to co-create scalable implementation paths for key verticals.
As we stand at a pivotal moment in the industry's evolution, we must think boldly and act decisively. The opportunity before us is immense. With stronger networks, deeper collaboration and responsible innovation, we can help AI move from seeing the world to changing it — not just doing things, but truly delivering outcomes that improve industries, cities, and people's lives.
With stronger collaboration and continued innovation, we can turn this opportunity into real impact across industries.
Pessoal 
Enterprise 
Carrier 
Huawei Cloud 
Digital Power 
