MWC25 Barcelona: 2025 is set to be the year where the world will witness more edge artificial intelligence (AI) application.
This will not be the typical AI personal computer (PC) or AI smartphone application, but AI that goes all the way to mission or business-critical applications.
So said Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at research firm Omdia, speaking at the Mobile AI Network Summit hosted by Huawei.
Huawei hosted the summit on the sidelines of this year’s MWC Barcelona, formerly Mobile World Congress Barcelona in Spain.
According to Su, Omdia keeps track of the AI democratisation, especially in edge devices, with mobility or cellular having become a key part of enabling that type of experience.
For mobile AI, one needs both connectivity and intelligence at the edge. Ideally, intelligence that can be updated over time and that is secure, he said.
“We have been talking about edge AI for close to 10 years now, ever since the rise of machine learning followed by deep learning. There is a push from various players within the industry to have a lot more AI in various devices – phones, gateways and servers.
“Now with all the genAI applications in the cloud pushing towards a more distributed type of future, we want AI to be across the board, to be found in every single device. On top of that, we want AI to be a better experience, to process multiple data modalities – we don’t want it restricted to text or images – we want it to understand every single form of data.
“It also has to be secure – you don’t want your phone to be hacked, used by malicious actors or for the data to be leaked elsewhere. All of these combined to form a need for a lot more operations at the edge. The answer to that is to have a generative AI model at the edge.”
Su pointed out that the world finds itself in the post-OpenAI era, which characterised by the DeepSeek era, adding that there is a lot of discussion around more optimised AI models on devices as well as discussions around smaller models on devices.
“There are a lot of players in this industry trying to go towards that future…we have Huawei and Alibaba – there are lot of vendors trying to figure out the challenges.
“We are looking at a future where there will be a lot of AI adoption across multiple devices, so it’s not just going to be smartphones, AI PCs or automotive. It will be cameras, all the different sensors in critical infrastructure, and in a lot of the field equipment. All these devices will have way more computing power.
“We will have generative AI that’s small enough and can understand and process multiple data modalities and is able to generate human-like responses.”
The chief analyst concluded that the industry has, for many years, had the right foundation for edge GenAI.
In addition to mission or business-critical application, AI will reach virtual reality glasses, AI in automotive, transportational or logistics application, AI in humanoids, etc.
“As an industry, it is time to get excited about mobile AI. With all the applications that are on the way, there are opportunities for the industry to do more.”
MWC Barcelona 2025 took place from 3 March to 6 March in Barcelona, Spain.
Share