Ronnie Vasishta, SVP of telecom at Nvidia, is confident the sector will be one of the biggest beneficiaries from the AI boom, predicting a transformational effect across both enterprise and consumer use cases.

Speaking on Mobile World Live’s latest podcast, Vasishta admits he hesitates to use the word transformation because it does get overused, but telecoms “is probably one of the places where you do want to use it”.

“In the next generation of telecoms, if you start off from where we’re going to be and then work our way back, It will be about intelligently connecting intelligence. It’s the fusion of compute and connectivity.”

Vasishta explained that connectivity was ultimately key to delivering the promise of AI, whether that is in training foundation models, deploying models, inferencing on phones, in addition to the latency required for AI-powered interactions.

“The connectivity fabric becomes essential. The orchestration of that connectivity fabric is dependant on the network, the computer nodes within that network.”

He also highlighted the “massive install base” that already exists in telecoms networks, translating into billions of smartphone users around the world as further reasons why operators and the sector are primed to benefit from the technology.

“Not only is the data collection capability there today, required to implement and optimise AI, but also the massive deployed base which enables the business models to be rapidly deployed.”

The executive added that Nvidia, which has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of the AI boom and briefly held the title as the world’s most valuable company, is helping operators mainly with how to process, leverage and onboard AI within their organisations.

During the interview, he also discussed Nvidia’s 6G Research Cloud Platform, which provides researchers a suite of services to advance AI for the next-generation of mobile technology.