Stop talking about AI's role in telemedia, it is telemedia

AI is now so entrenched in all things digital that we need to stop talking about AI and talk instead about the ways in which telemedia services will now operate in an AI-powered world. And that talk will be happening at Telemedia8.1LIVE in Barcelona and around the halls of Mobile World Congress at the end of this month.

AI has come to define the tech sector in just a few short years and it now sits behind everything we do. But it isn’t in machines out-smarting humans (yet!), primarily where it is adding value is in how it understands data and automated grunt work.

Sounds prosaic, but it is true. AI can sift the vast amounts of data that all digital services now accrue far quicker than any mere mortal. It can also spot trends, groupings and demographics that may otherwise go unseen.

This information is then passed to the humans, who are still way better at creating the content and services to tap into these new data groups. While they are doing that – investing the might and agility of the human mind in clever ways to market to other humans – AI can get on with writing the boring copy for all the everyday stuff.

This to me is the paradigm of AI right now. It is a tool and already we are making great use of it in marketing (see pages 1, 3 and 22), payments (pages 4 and 6), content services (page 14) and fraud protection (page 18).

Interestingly, the rise of AI has also shifted the mobile content market, with more consumers than ever now looking for AI and GenAI apps in the app stores (see page 20), as well as it not only playing a key role in the running of 5G networks (see page 28) but is one of the main technologies that will also derive the most use from both advanced 5G (see page 29) and the IoT-friendly 5G RedCap (see page 30).

So, should we be talking about AI? No. What we need to be talking about is what we do with AI – and that debate starts right here.

Paul Skeldon. editor