Published on Rethink Research: March 25, 2026
By Alex Davies, Senior Analyst, Rethink TV & Wireless Group
See original article for other vendor contributions: https://rethinkresearch.biz/articles/ai-undercurrent-highlights-mixed-telco-messaging-strategies-at-mwc/
In the current parlance, ‘AI’ doesn’t mean ‘artificial intelligence’ anymore. Most use it as a synonym for Large Language Models (LLMs), and if there is another definition, it is generally an extension of the machine learning (ML) techniques that have been applied in automation and analytics functions.
At MWC, the former definition was much less aggressively present than in 2025, and there were clearer examples of the latter. Still, some were making plays for the ‘artificial intelligence’ angle, but mostly from the infrastructure perspective – creating the vast computing arrays that they believe will power these next-generation workloads.
Another Lumine Group asset, Motive was acquired in 2024 after Nokia carved out its device management assets – including the Service Management Platform, Home Device Management, Impact IoT, Impact Mobile, and iSIM Secure Connect.
Pedro Costa, SVP and GM for Service Management Platform, joined post-acquisition, but explained that Motive has been using ML since the Alcatel-Lucent days.
“It’s used by most customers, but after the Lumine acquisition, we have been introducing AI as the natural evolution for ML,” said Costa.
“We use the GenAI assistant to give service recommendations, and it’s like having a subject matter expert sat next to you. But now with the agentic approach, the chatbot can interact directly with the systems, and carry out predictive care too. We can use whatever customer data is available, analyze it, and look for patterns that lead to problems. That’s quite important to operations, now,” said Costa.
“The technology is agnostic to LLMs, and several customers want to explicitly use their own local LLMs. We can train those models, and are open to them, but they’re used for data protection essentially. We will use synthetic data for training, in these cases, but use the real existing device management workflows,” noted Costa.
“The EU AI Act means you have to be very strict on internal processes now, ensuring that you don’t touch customer data,” warned Costa. “But the majority of our customers are in favor of this approach.”
Motive has support for the now-open-sourced MCP interface, said Costa. “We can expose the legacy system using MCP, if needed, but AI-to-AI integrations are easier. We aim to be modular and open here,” he said.
“We’re on our first true AI deployments now, but are considering if we could become a platform that handles all the data – as a hosting service of sorts. We don’t see a reason why we can’t, but the worry is the data getting into the LLM, and so we use synthetic data to avoid that risk,” said Costa.
When asked about the operator enthusiasm for AI, Costa said that Motive sees a lot of AI projects that don’t succeed, yet the operators still want it. “But they do want to see it in a live environment before they invest, and there are still a lot of security questions, so we will do a PoC first to show off its capabilities.”
“But AI is a natural evolution of ML for us. For customers, they often see internal AI investments not paying off, or major projects not meeting their initial targets. Now, they are much more selective – waiting to see if the technology will work. But this means that they are not training staff, and so there is a skills gap emerging, where the leaders are moving further ahead,” said Costa, stressing that AI made the most sense in applications like customer experience and support.