LIVE FROM MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS SHANGHAI: Baidu president Ya-Qin Zhang (pictured) trumpeted the impact of new technologies such as artificial intelligence on the IT space, while also noting the somewhat under-appreciated role of the telecoms operator.

“The internet still doesn’t give enough credit to the telecoms world. If there was no 3G or 4G, or in future 5G, infrastructure, then there wouldn’t be the internet, or all the apps created on top,” said the boss of China’s largest search engine. “Somehow, the two different worlds look at things differently.”

“When we look at things like autonomous driving, the latency, the speed, all this stuff, there’s still a lot of value – telecoms companies can provide a lot of value on top of the pipe. The pipe needs to be better, more intelligent,” he observed.

The executive also noted that operators are “sitting on a goldmine” with regard to the assets and customer data they control. But key to benefiting from this will be adopting a more open model, with “part of the problem in the past being that telecoms companies tried to do everything themselves”.

“That was ok just for the beginning, but in the long-run, to succeed, you need to be open,” he observed.

AI
Touching on what has become a tech industry hot-topic in recent years – artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning – the Baidu head said: “In a few years AI will be everywhere – in devices, services, the cloud, IoT. But right now, honestly, there is hype.”

“It will change the whole social architecture. It’s going to make a lot of companies irrelevant, some jobs will disappear and new companies and jobs will be created. It’s going to be very profound,” he continued.

And IoT also stands to significantly change the technology landscape.

“In the last 30 years, what we did was digitise the world, music, video, documents, workflow. And then using IP we connected it.”

“In the next 30 years we are going to map all of the digital technologies back into the physical world, the other way, and that is more profound and more impactful,” he said.