At MWC26, Barcelona, Sandeep Raina, Chief Marketing Officer at Mycom was interviewed by Alex Davies, Senior Analyst, Rethink TV & Wireless Group at Rethink Technology Research. Here is the interview from the article ‘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.
The last time we checked in with Mycom, it was still going by the MYCOM OSI moniker. It still provides software-based network automation and assurance products, after a gentle rebrand, but things have changed in recent years, with the introduction of AI, explained Chief Marketing Officer, Sandeep Raina.
“AI has been a journey for the operators. It first began being introduced into their operations around three years ago, with the focus on reducing costs and improving efficiency. The industry was right about that, but it did take time for the initial use cases to mature, waiting for the AI technologies to reach maturity. We moved from machine learning (ML) to natural language processing (NLP) to now the improvements in performance enabled by LLMs,” said Raina.
“For ML, the use cases were always based around pattern analysis. NLP made it much easier to track and tie patterns into support tickets, but the next step is fixing these identified problems,” said Raina, pointing to the work being done in the TM Forum.
“In theory, that AI-based mediation is closed-loop automation, but this is only partly true. The LLMs are useful for anomaly detection, but the actual fixes in the early days were done by third-party orchestrators, which the network OEMs often did not like working with.
The next step would be the agent-to-agent (A2A) communication, where the anomaly detection agent can speak directly to the OEM’s agent,” said Raina.
“This would speed up fixes, and enable Level 4 automation. The MNOs would have to have their own Mycom agents, running inside their networks, keeping that data internally secure. They would have to do some checks on the A2A communication, in a semi-human-in-the-loop process, initially, but in a fully closed-loop system, network optimization and fixes would essentially work like a self-healing network. The MNOs wouldn’t see the problem – they wouldn’t know that it existed,” said Raina.
“Still, vendors want to be able to point to the fixes they have made, but these OEMs don’t want to actually run the networks for the MNOs,” noted Raina, adding that Anthropic’s Claude was the more popular choice, but that Mycom was essentially agnostic on the choice of LLM.
“MNOs are always talking money – of capex versus opex. Most of our products are about reducing opex, but what’s stopping them from using our software to do capacity reorganizations, to reduce capex? How quickly could they automate the entire stack, as a money-saving measure,” Raina posited.
The above is an extract from the article ‘AI undercurrent highlights mixed telco messaging, strategies at MWC’ which was first posted by Rethink Technology Research on 25th March 2026: https://rethinkresearch.biz/articles/ai-undercurrent-highlights-mixed-telco-messaging-strategies-at-mwc/
