Next week I’ll be in Barcelona for MWC - Mobile World Congress. It’s been a while since I was last there, and I’m genuinely looking forward to it.

Back to the floor

MWC is one of those events that’s hard to replicate. The scale of it, the density of conversations, the chance encounters with people you haven’t seen in years. You can read a hundred industry reports and still get more signal from two days on the Fira Gran Via floor than from all of them combined.

I’ve been in telecom and technology long enough to have seen a lot of themes cycle through this event. Big data. Cloud. IoT. 5G. Each year something is declared the next revolution, and each year the reality takes a little longer than the hype suggests.

But this year feels different to me.

AI - from PoC to real products

The conversation I’m most interested in having at MWC this year is about AI going from proof of concept to actual products and projects.

We’ve spent the last two years running pilots, building demos, and showing what’s possible. Now the harder question is what’s shipping. What’s in production. What’s delivering real value to real users at scale.

That transition - from experimentation to execution - is where most of the interesting challenges live. Integration with legacy systems. Trust and governance. The gap between what AI can do in a sandbox and what it can reliably do in a live environment with messy data and real stakes.

These are the conversations I want to have. Not the stage keynotes, but the side rooms and the coffee stand talks where people are honest about what’s working and what isn’t.

Old colleagues, new connections

I spent years at du in Dubai leading digital transformation, and before that at Millicom and Yoigo. MWC has always been where that world comes together. I’m looking forward to reconnecting with familiar faces and meeting people I’ve only known through a screen.

If you’re going to be in Barcelona for MWC and want to connect - reach out. My calendar has a few slots open and I’m always up for a good conversation about where this industry is heading.

You can find me at [email protected] or connect via handled.sh.

See you in Barcelona. 🇪🇸