Huawei's Wang Tao predicts 2030: Hundreds of billions of intelligent agents worldwide will rewrite the communications landscape
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Author | Huang Yu
If the most important business model innovation in the mobile communications industry over the past twenty years was "traffic management," then in the AI era, operators are now seeking the next growth logic.
During the 2026 MWC Shanghai, Huawei Vice Chairman and Rotating Chairman Wang Tao stated: "The mobile communications industry is ushering in a new intelligent era. The rapid development of intelligent terminals and intelligent applications brings significant challenges and opportunities for industry growth."
He suggested that the future development of mobile communications should advance collaboratively along three pathways: industry, technology, and business. At the industrial level, a single network to accommodate the diverse connectivity needs of people, things, and intelligence; at the technical level, deep integration of AI and mobile communications to upgrade network capabilities; at the business level, "actively exploring new models and scenarios in mobile services to create new commercial value for sustainable growth."
Compared to the past few years of discussions centered around 5G-A coverage, speed, and experience, there has been a noticeable shift in communications focus, and "Token management" has become a trending term at this MWC Shanghai.
Wang Tao pointed out that over the past forty years, the capabilities of mobile networks have continually improved, while the business models of operators have evolved from user management to traffic management, experience management, and now further into Token management.
"Looking ahead to the next ten years, the new architecture and capabilities of mobile networks will provide global coverage across air, space, and land for diverse scenarios, ultra-large connectivity, native AI scheduling, and other capabilities, driving comprehensive upgrades in the service scenarios of operators, and supporting the construction of multidimensional commercial monetization mechanisms such as 'connectivity + traffic + slicing + satellite + computing power.'"
For the consumer market, operators may offer high-quality services such as intelligent experience tiered services or immersive communication assurance; for the enterprise market, network capacities can be commoditized, enabling services to be "committable, billable, callable."
Behind these changes is AI beginning to alter the sources of network value.
Wang Tao indicated that after 2030, embodied intelligence will push the scale of connectivity into the tens of billions, and global intelligent entities will break through into another tens-of-billions scale, possibly reaching trillion-scale by 2040. The demand for intelligent connectivity will become more diverse, extending from real-time interaction to high-reliability, low-latency communications.
Based on this, in the decade after 2030, new technologies and new scenarios such as general artificial intelligence, virtual-real fusion, low-altitude and long-distance communications, massive robots, full autonomous driving, and global IoT will bring explosive traffic growth and trillion-scale device connectivity demands.
Wang Tao predicts that mobile networks will expand from connecting people and things to connecting intelligence, with scales further increasing. The breadth, density, and quality of connections will require comprehensive upgrading.
For example, the breadth of connectivity needs to be integrated across land and sky, achieving 100% geographic coverage including high-altitude and marine areas; the density of intelligent entities in future hotspots is expected to exceed 10 million per square kilometer, far surpassing population density; business models will shift from mainly downstream content acquisition to balanced upstream and downstream collective intelligence collaboration, upgrading service models from "best effort" to scenario-based, task-level experience assurance.
This is also why during the 2026 MWC Shanghai, "uplink," "AI native core network," and "experience management" became industry focal points.
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