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AI agents are beginning to replace apps as the primary gateway to digital services. As execution overtakes interaction, power shifts toward those controlling infrastructure, compute and energy — redefining platform dominance, marketing strategy and digital sovereignty in the process.
At MWC 2026, telecom operators are repositioning themselves as the custodians of digital sovereignty. As AI, edge computing and geopolitical fragmentation reshape the technology landscape, control over networks — not apps — may determine who governs the infrastructure of the future digital society.
For most of the past three decades, each new generation of mobile technology followed a familiar Western script. Research was global, markets were competitive and standards were treated as neutral plumbing — slow, technical and largely apolitical. Power flowed from consumption: whoever deployed networks fastest and sold the most devices shaped the ecosystem.
In Eindhoven, Professor Martijn Heck explains how photonic chips — using light instead of electricity — may shape the next phase of computing. Beyond technology, the conversation reveals Europe’s fragile position between American power and China’s quiet scale.
In an age dominated by speed, disruption and visible technological spectacle, some of Europe’s most consequential decisions are made quietly. Not on conference stages or investor decks, but in registries, classifications and legal frameworks. Here, innovation does not shout — it accumulates.
BT under Allison Kirkby is no longer behaving like a traditional European telecom operator. It is no longer optimizing a legacy structure, nor defending historical assets. Instead, it is redefining what a telecom company is allowed to be in the AI era.
Allison Kirkby is not cutting costs. She is reshaping BT, stripping it to its essence. While global data consumption is at an all-time high, BT is reducing its workforce by 40%. This is not a conventional restructuring; it is the deliberate birth of a software-defined telecom, where AI is not just a tool, but the new engineer.
Telefónica is a century old. Once, it embodied Spanish modernity in its most tangible form: cables, exchanges, uniforms, physical presence. Today, it is something else — or is attempting to become something else entirely. Less visible. More abstract. More algorithmic. The central question is no longer how Telefónica grows, but what it is becoming.
A short but pointed intervention by Rafael A. Junquera, Co-Founder and Editorial Director of TeleSemana.com, is drawing attention inside the global telecom industry. Writing in Spanish, Junquera frames the current evolution of 5G not as a technology upgrade, but as a strategic fork in the road that could shape power relations in telecommunications for decades.
When Warren Buffett speaks, markets listen. His annual letters are dissected line by line, his investment choices treated as signals of economic truth. Yet far from the spotlight, a far larger and arguably more consequential investor shapes global capitalism with almost no noise at all. Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global — often called the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund — does not try to beat the market. It is the market.
