5G and WiFi 6.0 are underway. How will they change the business landscape and affect AI? Muni Vinay Kamisetty, the Head of Data and Automation at Lazada, Southeast Asia's leading eCommerce platform attended Worldwide AI Webinar to provide insights into this question. Keep reading for the highlights of his keynote.

Check out his speech on our website and YouTube channel.

The current situation of 5G and WiFi 6 and their potential impacts

According to Muni Vinay, 5G and WiFi 6 will soon be available all around the world even if you don’t want them.

Currently, 493 operators in 150 countries are investing 5G and WiFi 6. The total 5G subscription is predicted to reach 1 billion by the end of 2022 while it was only 220 million in 2021. A study by Ericsson reported that by 2024, broadband IoT powered by 5G/WiFi 6 will overtake 2G and 3G. Qualcomm estimated that the world would witness over 2 billion 5G connections and 5.2 billion WiFi 6 shipments by 2025 and potentially will create a $13.1 trillion economic impact in the next 12 to 15 years.

Since technologies will not just interact with your mobile devices but also your other digital devices like IoTs and some innovative technologies which require low latency and high performance like AR/VR, 5G, and WiFi 6 have proven to be the future.

Integrating 5G and WiFi 6 into your business

Muni Vinay drew out the 5G and WiFi 6 journey for any corporates that would like to integrate these new technologies into their business and be ahead of the pack.

Understand corporate goals: adoption of new technologies needs to align with the company’s strategy.
Assess the market readiness: analyze the market readiness of key actors for 5G/WiFi 6.0
Select use cases: consider both business considerations and technical implications for use case selection
Plan the infrastructure holistically: think about holistic solutions such as integration with Big Data, AI and Edge services
Plan your governance early: think about RACI, ethical interpretable operations with niche technologies
Invest in security: IAM, Cyber and on-device security is critical and needs to be planned at IoT device level
Think about the edge networks: invest to implement the command centers, edge networks and edge cloud solutions
Plan Edge MLOps: automation is important right from the use case data collection, model building and edge implementation

5G/WiFi 6 and AI

Muni Vinay stated that as soon as 5G interacts with the IoT, the kind of data that IoT devices generate is at least about 15 times more than the normal data that you usually get in your organizations. This means that you need to start moving from your infrastructure, modernize your data and support these in real-time.

In the 5G era, when there are 25 billion connected IoT devices, artificial intelligence will have a computer IQ of over 10,000. Everything will be securely connected to enable new products and services, intelligent platforms will enhance decision-making and automation and there will be flexible, reliable, high-speed, low-latency and high-capacity networks.

Thus, there needs to be better infrastructure to bridge 5G/WiFi 6.0 with AI and IoT.

Muni Vinay Kamisetty listed out detailed examples of AI and 5G/WiFi 6.0 complementation in his speech. Watch it on our website and YouTube channel.