This is a special, bonus episode of The McKinsey Podcast. McKinsey Partner Ferry Grijpink joined McKinsey Editorial Director Roberta Fusaro to share some immediate takeaways from the annual Mobile World Congress (MWC) event in Barcelona.
The McKinsey Podcast is hosted by Roberta Fusaro and Lucia Rahilly.
This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.
Roberta Fusaro: What’s the mood in Barcelona?
Ferry Grijpink: On the one hand, it’s very exciting. We have the CEOs of large telcos and vendors, and there are about 100,000 people here. At the same time, it’s one of those years in the middle. We have a lot of talk about AI, but I think it has slowly started to set in with people here that it will take time to build the right data and structure in an ethical and responsible way.
There’s lots of discussion about network APIs, a topic we were very excited about last year, and much work has happened since then: 12 to 13 large telcos formed a JV [joint venture] with one of the vendors to bring them out. But it’s all about laying the groundwork, the monetization, and making sure that customers and enterprises feel it. That will take some time. This year is about how we are going to deploy that tech and make real value happen for the shareholders, the customers, and the enterprises.
Roberta Fusaro: Has gen AI been the single most talked-about topic, or have there been other kinds of new and exciting topics to emerge?
Ferry Grijpink: Interestingly enough, AI is everywhere, and everybody talks about it, but it’s subdued because it’s like, “OK, we have agents, we have use cases, POCs [proofs of concept], but no scale yet.” People had hoped that by this year, there would be a lot of scale. The other thing that is quite surprising is satellite. Typically, at Mobile World Congress, we don’t talk about satellite. But the US now having what we call “direct to satellite”—where you can use SMS to directly connect to a satellite and, potentially, you’re making phone calls—is really shaking up the industry because it will require less network; you have more coverage at different places. So it’ll really change the dynamic of the industry.
Roberta Fusaro: Does that represent one of the key growth areas, or are there others that are shaking up the industry?
Ferry Grijpink: Well, what was also interesting to see is a big divergence between what I would call the Western telcos and the more emerging-market telcos. At one keynote this year, a couple of large Western telcos were presenting. They were upbeat around enterprise APIs. But then the next keynotes were presented by emerging-market telcos, who were talking about “What can we do in fintech? How are we going to help our continents or our countries to deploy AI?” So quite different but also very upbeat. It was exciting to see how positive and inspired they were.
Roberta Fusaro: When we spoke last year, we talked a lot about 5G and gen AI. Maybe we were excited about the potential there. Is there discussion about how 5G has evolved?
Ferry Grijpink: There are upgrades that still need to happen, but overall, what you see is that the industry is realizing they need to bond together and create value out of it. This is not individual telcos competing with each other. It’s the telcos jointly bringing this capability so enterprises and developers can use it. That’s a different muscle the industry has to flex. They’re very used to competing hard, head-to-head with each other. Now they need to bring a capability to system integrators and developers to create new, magical experiences. That’s scary, but it’s also very passionate.
Now you see indie developers meeting with a group of young developers who are trying to use some of these APIs in gaming or in enterprises that can use it to fight fraud or, for example, can see how to use the 5G network to optimize autonomous-truck operations. So, again, we’re going from technology promises to delivering customer value.
Roberta Fusaro: I’ve been following the MWC happenings from afar via social media, and I see a lot of innovation with phones themselves: for example, foldable phones or tiny pocket projectors. I’m curious if any of that “techie tech” has been intriguing to you and what you’ve seen on the ground, or if anything’s been really exciting to you in terms of the actual mobile phone design and where that’s going.
Ferry Grijpink: When you look at the form factors, the phones have looked the same for the past seven years. Now over the past 12 months, you see the form factors of the flip phone happening because of foldable screens, especially from Asia—we see a lot of Asian panelists showing off their cool phones. But we also see more and more people starting to use phone technology in glasses. So can we integrate the phone with smart glasses? There’s a lot of new experimentation going on. We haven’t landed on something specific. The foldable phone is still niche, but for the first time in seven or eight years, we see people experimenting. And that has to do with gen AI because the reality is that once the interface becomes a bit easier, you can talk with the phones. The phones understand you a bit better. Then that pane of glass you have can be anything.
So I think we’ll see much more innovation now. It’s a very exciting period. For example, a blind person showed me one of those glasses with a little camera. He said, “When I go to a supermarket, often people put things back in the wrong place. So now I just pick something up, and I ask my glasses, ‘Hey, is this the right rice? The ten-minute rice I want?’ And it says, ‘Yes, it is.’” Or if it’s not, they can pick the other bag of rice.
Also, for people with disabilities or for people who don’t have access to everything—or maybe you’re [unfamiliar] with a language—these new form factors can really open up the technology for you.
Roberta Fusaro: What is the most surprising speaker or announcement or experience that you’ve had at Mobile World Congress this year?
Ferry Grijpink: What was most amazing was seeing so many other industries joining MWC. We were next to a defense player here, quite close to the McKinsey stand. There’s a car company. We even have a telco that now has an AI delivery van for groceries. Given that we are in that phase of monetizing the technology, it’s not just about phones anymore. It’s about robots; it’s about drones; it’s about radar. It’s a bit like Paris in 1880. You see all the new stuff that will happen in the next ten years.
Roberta Fusaro: Ferry, I know you have to get back to the floor, so my final question is about Barcelona itself. You’ve been here multiple times. What’s been different for you this year?
Ferry Grijpink: I’ve been visiting Barcelona for 20 years, and I always pass one of the Gaudí buildings, and it looks beautiful on the outside, but I’ve never been inside. This is the first year that I went inside. It’s stunning. It has these small, beautiful, round rooms, colorful gardens, a rooftop. For anybody who goes to Barcelona, there’s a huge queue, but it’s worth the effort.
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