At Mobile World Congress last week, the show floor was abuzz with AI. It was the same at CES two months earlier: The biggest theme of the biggest consumer tech show was that AI suddenly seemed to be part of every single product. But the hype can make it hard to know what we should be excited about, what we should fear and what we should dismiss as a fad.
“Omnipresent … but also overwhelming.” That’s how CCS Insight Chief Analyst Ben Wood described the MWC moment. “For many attendees, I felt it was rapidly reaching levels that risked causing AI fatigue.”
But there was a positive side as well. Said Wood: “The most impressive demos were from companies showing the benefits AI could offer rather than just describing a service or a product as being AI-ready.”
At last year’s MWC, the popular generative AI tool ChatGPT was only around 3 months old, and on-device AI was mostly a twinkle in the eye of the tech companies present. This year, on-device was a reality, and attendees — like me — could experience it on the show floor.
I got to experience several demos featuring AI on devices, and the best of them brought artificial intelligence to life in ways I’d never seen before. In many cases, I could see that products we’re already familiar with — from smartphones to cars — are getting a new lease on life thanks to AI, with some offerings using the technology in unique ways to set themselves apart from rivals. In other cases, new types of products, like AI-focused wearables and robots, are emerging that have the potential to displace what we know and love.
Above all, it was clear that on-device AI isn’t a technology for tomorrow’s world. It’s available right here, right now. And it could impact your decision as to what piece of technology you buy next.
The age of AI phones has arrived
One of my biggest takeaways from MWC was that while all tech companies now have a raft of AI tools at their disposal, most are choosing to deploy them in different ways.
Take…
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