LIVE FROM HUAWEI CONNECT 2018, SHANGHAI: The biggest benefit artificial intelligence (AI) technology will bring to mobile operators is autonomous networks, Eric Xu, Huawei’s rotating chairman (pictured), predicted.

Speaking at a press conference after delivering a keynote, Xu said autonomous networks will enable operators to eliminate most, if not all, of their operational and maintenance engineering positions at some point.

“Huawei certainly doesn’t hope for that,” he said, noting that demand for data engineers and scientists will increase as operators need the expertise of these positions to achieve the goal of building fully autonomous networks using AI.

The rotating chairman steered clear of adding detail to ambitious automation plans teased by chief strategy marketing officer William Xu at Huawei’s annual analyst summit in Shenzhen in April.

At the time, the strategy executive said Huawei was working on autonomous networks by adding AI to its network architecture to improve operators’ operational efficiency. The vendor had promised updates on this vision at the current event.

The chairman went on to say the power of advanced AI applications will enable many enterprises to thrive in the face of rapid change and disruption, while others will simply disappear.

“This is a natural phenomenon in business” and the case in past industrial revolutions, he said. For example, when autonomous vehicles become a reality, car insurance companies could disappear as well as many other supporting sectors.

In his morning keynote he announced the launch of Huawei’s full-stack AI portfolio which comprises four layers: chipsets; application enablement; unified training framework; and computing architecture.