MWC24 review: will AI, 6G or androids take the top prize?

Another year, another MWC. Cerillion’s Product Director, Brian Coombs, looks back on the highs and lows of 2024’s event, doling out his awards for the best in telecoms and connectivity tech for this year.

As my retrospective on MWC is coming out as the Oscars are still in the news, I thought I’d come up with my own awards ceremony for MWC24 – the Brians, if you will – to recognise what I thought represented the best of what was on display at this year’s event.

The “no prizes for guessing” prize goes to…

AI. There was a lot of AI there, as you’d expect.

From Samsung putting AI at the heart of the marketing effort for the latest Galaxy phone, to Rhea’s Barista-On-Demand where coffee could be yours via a self-driving, automated service that you summon from an app, lots of companies had AI integrated into their products.

The “surprise of the show” goes to…

AI – it wasn’t absolutely everywhere!

I was surprised that there were a lot of companies not making a noise about how they’d AI-enabled their products. Are they still testing? Are they struggling to come up with ideas for how to use the new technology? Are they worried about privacy / commercial sensitivity?

When I think back to some of the hot topics and trends from previous years and how they’ve been shoehorned into everything at the show (IoT toothbrushes, I’m looking at you) I did expect more of the same.

The “pointless gadget of the year” goes to…

The Lenovo laptop with a see-through lid / screen.

Ok, the tech was reasonably interesting, but really, why? Personal privacy is out of the window as you’re displaying everything, well, on a window, and it’s distracting to use as you can see everything behind. But why? Their demo of a bird on the screen interacting with a plant behind the screen was clever, but are there any genuine use cases for that? Maybe I’ll be amazed with what people come up with in the near future.

The “are we really ready for this conversation yet?” award goes to…

6G.

Yes, there really are companies trying to get people excited about the next G. It was early days, so it was mostly just a hype sticker, but I guess it needs to start somewhere. Meanwhile, out in the real world, only about 60% of operators expect to have a 5G network rolled out at any kind of scale by the end of this year, and none of them that I’m aware of have worked out how to actually increase their revenue on the back of it.

As always, this one is going to grow over the next few years, with more and more promises that 6G will be the one to solve all your problems, and make a load of money.

The “I thought this was a mobile show?” award goes to…

Flying cars and drones!

A few years back MWC resembled a car show. This year the vehicles had to be able to take off to get any attention. There were at least 3 full-size multi people carriers, including one from SK Telecom that you could have a VR air-taxi ride in. There was Alef, with its flying car prototype, and countless others offering drones over 5G, drones delivering 5G, and drones delivering anything else you can think of. It does feel like this is an area that will very soon become ubiquitous and part of our daily lives.

The “most impressive technology on display” goes to…

Anika, the robot from Etisalat (which also impressed Tafsia), displaying a notably smooth set of movements and excellent (and very fast) voice recognition. This was especially so, given the noisy exhibition environment and people just shouting at her.

However, what really impressed me was the interaction of the question and then the physical response; while I was there, someone asked what her favourite music was. She answered: “as I’m a robot it must be heavy metal,” so a nice joke, but then she started doing the “horns” hand symbol, then some music started up on a nearby stand and she began to dance to that and said, “but this isn’t bad either”. A very natural and smooth combination.

The “best demo of the show” award goes to…

Cerillion’s GenAI integration with our product catalogue and workflow configuration.

Yes, that’s right – we had some real wow moments on the stand as people came to see how to configure their products. The natural language input is impressive, but what really got people excited was handing them a tablet and asking them to sketch out their package structure, which was then automatically turned into the corresponding product configuration.

Going one step further, we’d then go to their website, take a screenshot of their products, then load that same screenshot into the product catalogue, and within 30 seconds, their products were configured in our system.

Impressive stuff, if I do say so myself, and an area that is going to see a lot of development over the next few months, so watch this space.

See you all next year!

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