Ericsson CEO Looks Ahead to an AI-Powered Network

Much of the artificial intelligence talk at Mobile World Congress is at the device level -- services based on voice recognition, in particular. But AI has a role deeper in the infrastructure, of course, and Ericsson touched on that to kick off the conference Monday morning. In Ericsson's traditional MWC opener for press and analysts, Ericsson CEO Börje Ekholm understandably focused on 5G. But AI and machine learning were the second topic of his overview, an indication of how deeply Ericsson expects these technologies to change the network. Nokia is in the process of acquiring Deepfield, a deep learning startup, to help with traffic flows in software-defined networking (SDN).