Agentic AIs on smartphone dashboards will leverage application tools instead of users themselves, predicted Jasmeet Singh Sethi, Head of Ericsson ConsumerLab.Taking cues from the ConsumerLab report, he talked about how AI agents will take centre-stage in consumer experience and use applications like editing apps themselves instead of the user. In conversation with businessline, Sethi talked about how 5G connectivity will play a big role in this transition to an app-less economy where consumers will demand better services for a seamless AI experience.
What are the network requirements that are needed currently for Generative AI?
The biggest change required is to work on the uplink capacity for GenAI to communicate with cloud servers in real-time. As of now, we don’t see Gen AI putting a lot of load on the traffic, as it is still prompt based. With the emergence of new devices, we are moving away from prompts to multimodal input, which is much heavier than text-based prompts.
This requires more uplink capacity rather than downlink, which networks traditionally focused on. So, we need to rethink how we design the networks, over the next 10 years.
Do you feel telecoms are addressing these requirements?
Yes, a lot of operators are thinking about uplink and the shift towards 5G Stand Alone (SA) is an answer to that. Jio has launched a 5G SA and so are in a better shape to think about uplink.
Airtel has also said that they have ambitions in that area and started with fixed wireless access- FWA. So, I think 5G SA is part of that network evolution to deal with that uplink capacity because you are no longer anchored on 4G.
What makes AI features so popular in India?
The advantage that India has is that we have a large tech-savvy user base. Compared to the US, we have a large majority of AI enthusiasts in our market. It is a big incentive that we have an educated, young user base that is not skeptical about AI.
Hopefully, we will see much more advanced, localized capabilities that will probably come into the market.
Hyper-localization & hyper-personalization are the buzzwords that are cropping up a lot these days. Are we looking at a future where each individual consumer experience will be completely unique?
Yes, because one AI agent is going to be very different from another. People’s personal preferences, purchase history, life stage is different from others. From an AI perspective, I think we are closer to such an experience than we think. It’s a matter of at least five years.
My prediction is that we are moving towards an app-less economy where the internet is driven by the AI. You might not even utilize apps. So, we might not have apps over the next five years.
The Agentic AI dashboard on your smartphone will use the apps instead. So, how we use applications is also going to change. The companies that develop a good balance between data privacy and end-user value will succeed in this space.
Your report also mentioned about the response time expectations for GenAI not being met on 5G. What can service providers do to address this?
A lot of youngsters in the 15 to 25 years range said they were dissatisfied with the response time on Gen AI. The interesting part was that they blamed their service providers, not AI servers.
So, the onus largely rests with CSPs, which is an opportunity for CSPs to work on something like an Edge AI on the network and play a role in this value chain as well.
We see a lot of operators globally are now starting to participate in this AI value chain.
How does India’s move towards indigenous AI models impact the current scenario?
It becomes much more contextual and localized. The part where this will be really interesting is the multilingual capabilities of these LLMs out there. Most of the model might be trained on English data, so there is an opportunity to think about how these models deal with multilingual capabilities and data in different languages.
India has lots of data to start with, and if we can capitalize on that data fabric and think about a made-in-India AI model, then that’s a great opportunity. We need to start thinking about the user experience rather than just the availability.
The availability was the first innings. Now, we need to think about monetization and user experience of 5G.
Most people in India are still on 4G. What happens to them in this new economy?
Eventually we see that the transition will happen. Today, 70 per cent of users are still on 4G but maybe by 2027, there will be a transition from 4G to 5G. I don’t think it’s a big barrier. However, CSPs should think about a good value argumentation of 5G.
The current marketing around 5G focuses on higher speeds. There is no differentiation in terms of the 5G experience that a high-paying postpaid subscriber has versus a prepaid subscriber.
That begs the question whether the tariff repair theory is really sustainable. How long can we really push the envelope on increasing the base prices on plans before we start getting some sort of backlash from consumers?
Published on February 14, 2025
