
Here’s What Telco Industry Experts Had to Say About AI at MWC 2025

What can 109,000 telco industry experts from over 200 different countries agree on in 2025?
The AI grace period is over
2024 was the year of exploring what’s possible. Optimism, idealism and perhaps a little skepticism colored the conversation. For last year’s communication service providers (CSPs), AI was still a distant dream of ruthless efficiency and revolutionary customer experiences in some nebulous future state—per Telecoms.com’s Annual Industry Survey in late 2023, as many as 19% of CSPs weren’t yet planning to deploy AI at all.
But just over a year later, it’s a different story. AI has already becomeCSPs’ top priority investment area for 2025 . And at Mobile World Congress , this tone reversal shone through as an overarching imperative: CSPs must embrace 2025 as the prove-it year for AI.
The telco industry is reaching a pivotal juncture. Those who decide on a pragmatic course of action and commit to it will pull ahead, while organizations that fail to incorporate AI will be left to reverse-engineer their competitors’ successes.
For CSPs that are still determining a path forward, draw inspiration from four prominent themes that telco industry leaders identified as the future of AI at MWC 2025:
Agentic AI is in
The imaginative output of generative AI (GenAI) may garner the biggest mainstream buzz, but at MWC 2025, the talk was all about agentic AI.
Unlike GenAI, which is limited to creating content in direct response to prompts, agentic AI acts autonomously . These agents can be trained to proactively identify issues, evaluate solutions and commit to a decision—all without a person pulling the strings.
Such technology promises endless applications to the customer experience (CX). While AI is commonly used as a virtual assistant in call centers today, Gartner predicts that . Smarter self-service options translate to lower operational costs, enhanced productivity and stronger customer loyalty for telcos that embrace agentic AI.
