Analyst(s): Ron Westfall
Publication Date: March 25, 2025
What is Covered in this Article:
- AI has consistently proved a top priority in conversations, correlating strongly with driving hot topics such as connectivity/5G, cybersecurity, and network APIs.
- AI is fully identified as critical to 5G progress because it can augment various aspects of 5G networks, ultimately leading to improved performance, efficiency, and user experience.
- Key mobile ecosystem players HPE, Cisco, Ericsson, and Rakuten Symphony provided critical updates and announcements at the show that accented AI’s vital role in improving mobile ecosystem outcomes.
The News: The annual 2025 Mobile World Congress (MWC) event in Barcelona brought together 109,000 attendees from 205 countries and territories, including 2,900+ exhibitors, sponsors, and partners, as well as 1,200+ speakers and thought leaders, for a week of announcements, panels, and insightful, far-reaching conversations on the future of the mobile ecosystem. The show emphasized AI as a prime driver of the mobile ecosystem, with security standing out as an integral requirement for 5G ecosystem innovations to have enduring success, as confirmed through a wide range of discussions and top-priority vendor initiatives.
MWC 2025: The AI Factor
Analyst Take: MWC Barcelona 2025 once again proved itself as the mobile ecosystem citadel for tech companies and key players across the mobile ecosystem to spotlight their key portfolio development and marketing initiatives. This year’s event highlighted remarkable advancements across various fields, showcasing the dynamic progression of the worldwide mobile ecosystem. From my perspective, AI played a fundamental role in how vendors are positioning their portfolios and how organizations are selecting solutions.
AI, including GenAI, is widely viewed as the technology that is essential to driving mobile ecosystem advances, underpinning progress with improving energy efficiency, RAN automation, streamlining 5G delivery, and strengthening vertical use cases. Key takeaways from insightful and thoughtful conversations at the show demonstrate why:
HPE: AI and Automation
Javier Orellano, HPE Chief Technologist for Networking, provided an update on how HPE Networking Consulting Services can help organizations prepare for and adopt AI on their networks. As such, HPE is prioritizing HPE Services as the trusted partner that ensures customers are well-equipped to navigate the complexities of AI-driven networking and reap its many benefits. This approach is critical to showing how networking efficiencies can play an integral role in supporting overall customer energy efficiency and sustainability goals, particularly as AI compute and workload put immense pressure on energy demand.
HPE Private Cloud AI integrates NVIDIA AI software, computing, and networking with HPE’s AI software, storage, compute, and services. It enables rapid deployment of an enterprise-grade AI platform with a cloud experience that keeps data private and integrates with popular AI tools. Through full-lifecycle AI services, HPE offers comprehensive capabilities across the AI lifecycle, from initial consulting to ongoing optimization. This includes strategy development, skills training, data management, architecture design, and solution implementation.
In addition, HPE spotlighted how AI-driven insights enable data-driven decision-making, allowing organizations to optimize their infrastructure investments, improve customer experience, and drive revenue growth. By cultivating the power of AI in networking, HPE Networking Consulting Services can give customers a competitive edge, increase agility, and set themselves up for long-term success.
Cisco (Mobility Solutions)
Roya Sharfiei, Senior Sales Director, Mobility Group, focused on why Cisco’s AI portfolio can underpin Cisco Mobility Group and Cisco Mobility Services Platform market expansion, aligning with the mobile ecosystem trend that shows organizations are prioritizing E2E AI portfolio and AI expertise as the topmost selection criteria.
Cisco is streamlining 5G deployments, empowering CSPs to swiftly configure and activate innovative use cases that connect people, places, and things. By simplifying rollouts, CSPs can monetize a wide variety of new services. This can cut the time, cost, and effort required to leverage 5G’s potential for driving revenue, business value, and enterprise adoption.
To overcome barriers, the Cisco Mobility Services Platform offers an as-a-service solution for deploying value-added 5G offerings. Providing pre-integrated, cloud-native 5G core network functions can simplify the complexity of mobile service delivery at scale. The platform can simplify operations through a flexible subscription model powered by proven Cisco technologies for 5G, IoT, and multi-cloud. This allows CSPs to redirect investments toward developing compelling 5G use cases across verticals that drive sustainability through new revenue streams.
Ericsson (Wireless Solutions, Strategy & Alliances & WAN/Security)
Throughout the Mingle with Ericsson Executives: Peter Linder, Head of Thought Leadership North America, helped provide key updates at the gathering alongside insightful conversations with Åsa Tamsons, CEO of Cradlepoint & Head of Business Area Wireless Solutions, Youssef Lotayef, VP of Strategy & Alliances, and Camille Campbell, Director of Wireless WAN & Security Product Marketing. Key takeaways of how Ericsson Enterprise Wireless Solutions leverages AI to improve customer outcomes included:
Ericsson is prioritizing investment in AI to perform as a trusted partner for customers in their AI journeys. As such, Ericsson’s AI-powered solutions are built to help reduce order fallouts, improve issue resolution time, and streamline activation processes. For instance, the NetCloud AIOps dashboard tool simplifies 5G network operations by aggregating data into a single dashboard. It identifies performance issues, isolates their causes, and pinpoints affected sites, users, and applications. The dashboard also turns cellular signal quality indicators into actionable insights to improve network performance.
Key to expanding Ericsson’s AI market credentials is its AI-based NetCloud Assistant (ANA) which uses natural language processing to assist users with network operation queries. It provides recommendations on cellular endpoints for specific use cases and helps troubleshoot network performance issues. ANA correlates information from Ericsson’s technical documentation library to provide concise, personalized summaries and guidance on WAN edge device configuration based on best practices. Unlike traditional chatbots that use external APIs, Ericsson’s ANA is hosted entirely within Ericsson’s environment, ensuring user and data privacy. This approach prevents sensitive network data from being exposed to third-party services.
Looking ahead, in 2025, Ericsson plans to incorporate AI into the network traffic analysis dashboard within NetCloud SASE. This feature will analyze traffic flows to identify security anomalies that may indicate a breach, improving threat detection and prevention. Also, Ericsson showed how AI-driven computer vision and 5G can streamline inventory management in key verticals such as healthcare settings using AI-powered cameras that can automatically track inventory.
Overall, I believe that by integrating AI across its Enterprise Wireless solutions, Ericsson is addressing the growing complexity of network infrastructure and the challenges of managing modern technologies, ultimately providing more value to its enterprise customers.
Rakuten Symphony (OSS)
Anshul Bhatt, Chief Product Office, OSS BU, provided Rakuten Symphony’s OSS portfolio update and Faisel Ghazeleh, Global Head of Solution Engineering, joined the NMG 5G Modernization panel. They spotlighted how Rakuten AI offers intuitive tools for experts across domains and teams to collaborate around, centralize and streamline data management and AI modeling processes. It fully supports both traditional predictive AI and generative AI models.
Rakuten Symphony has introduced a set of standalone licensable AI products linked with its OSS:
- Anomaly Detection
- Energy Saver
- Process Miner
- Automation Engineer
- AI-powered rApps
They are also integrating augmented AI features within existing OSS products, such as planning support. This includes developing a Capacity Forecasting AI Model to automate capacity management, improving service quality and resource allocation. Moreover, Rakuten Symphony is working towards creating intent-based networks, where AI-driven autonomy allows the network to automatically adjust its activities based on specified intents or KPIs.
From my perspective of key importance is the development of its standalone telecom Large Language Model (LLM) AI product codenamed RAi. This LLM aims to provide a conversational interface to Rakuten Symphony’s operational systems, making interactions more intuitive and efficient.
Further augmenting its AI portfolio credentials, Rakuten Symphony is working towards propagating intent-based networks, where AI-driven autonomy allows the network to automatically adjust its activities based on specified intents or KPIs. I believe that by assimilating AI capabilities flexibly across its OSS portfolio, Rakuten Symphony is solidly positioned to streamline telecom operations, reduce complexity, and enable more agile and efficient network management
Looking Ahead
Overall, I believe that AI portfolio development and marketing will play a more integral role in the near-term and long-term success of mobile network capabilities including 5G service innovation. As MWC25 confirmed, AI-driven innovations are transforming mobile networks, making them smarter, faster, more secure, and capable of meeting the evolving demands of users and applications. The moves and updates by HPE, Ericsson, Cisco, and Rakuten Symphony show that AI Integration is vital to delivering improved customer experience and business outcomes throughout the global mobile ecosystem.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
Other insights from The Futurum Group:
MWC 2025: Why Mobile Security Matters More than Ever
Ericsson Open RAN, Apple C1 & Telstra Open Programmable 5G Advanced Moves – Six Five Webcast
MWC 2025: Qualcomm and IBM Raise GenAI Competitive Stakes
Author Information
Ron is an experienced, customer-focused research expert and analyst, with over 20 years of experience in the digital and IT transformation markets, working with businesses to drive consistent revenue and sales growth.
He is a recognized authority at tracking the evolution of and identifying the key disruptive trends within the service enablement ecosystem, including a wide range of topics across software and services, infrastructure, 5G communications, Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), analytics, security, cloud computing, revenue management, and regulatory issues.
Prior to his work with The Futurum Group, Ron worked with GlobalData Technology creating syndicated and custom research across a wide variety of technical fields. His work with Current Analysis focused on the broadband and service provider infrastructure markets.
Ron holds a Master of Arts in Public Policy from University of Nevada — Las Vegas and a Bachelor of Arts in political science/government from William and Mary.
