Good evening once again. It's been a long set of sessions and very long lines of traffic, and therefore I'm glad you could make it here. Let's try and get it to something that everybody here and those who are watching us know, which is their handset, and you as the company are behind the networks that actually power everything in the digital arena. I want to begin by asking you about what Ericsson calls the intelligent digital fabric. Can you give our audience a sense of what is that vision and what does it potentially promise to deliver?
Okay. Well, I mean, we have very potent technologies now that are more and more being talked about in society. It's AI, it's a cloud, it is the mobile networks. And AI and cloud alone won't make it. You also need the mobile network there. You will be out and about wherever you are. You want to be able to use your AI-powered applications in the future. So that's part of a big system that will be truly important going forward. In that, we have lots of technology to manage, control, and steer it. There will be AI agents that are positioned in different parts of the network, having different roles and adding intelligence to it. All of this coming together is a fabric for the future that will drive efficiency and pleasure as well for people and lots of good value for industries, enterprises, and society as a whole.
That's a good way of setting the stage for this conversation because people would understand AI through the apps that they have already on their phones. And we know that the numbers in India are staggering of hundreds of millions of smartphones and the amount of adoption of AI apps and other abilities is phenomenal. What will AI mean for the cell phone that I hold in my hand today? If I may ask you, will it kind of make the phone smaller? Will it disappear the screen? Will the phone get embedded in me? What is the future of smartphones in an era of AI?
Okay. Well, smartphones will be smarter, I think. So we talk in our industry about AI for the networks and AI or networks for AI. And one important thing is that the networks together with the smartphones support your usage of AI-based algorithms and applications. And here, of course, it's very important how we design the networks for the future to make sure that the different characteristics of this kind of usage is very well supported. And there are some things that we trend and follow to make sure that we always are at the edge of what's possible to do, and that will continue or always continue. And I think one thing that we talk quite a bit about is to perhaps be a bit technical about latency and delay, how quickly when you push a button, how snappy is a system, if I put it that way, right? And here we monitor again how AI usage on top of the system has a need for the system being responsive. And our research group works on this. Our product implementation people work on it, and we work on it together with the makers of smartphones through standardization and through alignment in the industry. So your smartphone device will be snappier, better going forward, I argue. But that's certainly not the end of it. It also opens up for new kinds of devices coming about. And here, I think media-intense devices will be there. And if I exemplify one, I'd say XR glasses.
Already we see that for industrial use, and we see it for very, I think, high-value use like in healthcare, assisting surgeons in full commercial service, making sure they have a precision cut being assisted from AI-based applications and conveyed the information to a hologram lens. Now that's a precursor for you and me as private persons being out and about again with glasses that are XR-capable. I mean, imagine for me, I live in Singapore and coming here to Delhi, I look at a building, I want to know what's the history of that, and all of a sudden I can see it explained on my screen. And you talking in one of your native tongues, I can get it real-time translated. There will be many applications where we as consumers, as professionals, will use this in the future. So the future is a lot more than the smarter smartphones, and the future is already here.
We've seen a demo that's been already done by Servam, which is India's first sovereign LLM, and it's getting rave reviews of a glass of the kind that Magnus just spoke about. You know, for many of the folks here, I stuck to the smartphone example to be able for people to relate to what your company does. But this is a company that powers networks across the world. Without the network, you won't have any of these functionalities available. So now, two more points. One, with the numbers that we have in India of smartphone usage and the network lies behind it, the common man is not able to touch and feel it. He only kind of looks at it and says, 'Oh, my signal isn't very good in this area' or 'I get these spam calls.' I want you to try and explain to our audience here how AI is improving the network experience for the average user. And I ask you this question in the backdrop of the fact that some of the lowest ARPOs in the world are on Indian networks, and these subscribers, through a combination of companies like you and the service providers like Bharti or Jio or others, are delivering phenomenal experiences at very low price points. Therefore, what is AI doing for a better network experience for the end user?
Okay, thank you. Well, there are many parts to this. I think one thing, let's say before I go into AI, that you've hit upon the scale and the importance in a high-technology business to really reach scale. And I think the mobile industry has it, and that is truly for the benefits globally to markets, and India is a role model in that. Q3 last year, 87% of all smartphones sold in India were 5G-capable, and the lowest cost here, $70 to $110 US, grew by 1,600%. It's phenomenal. Say around $100 US, you get a 5G-potent smartphone, which from a technology point of view is extraordinarily complicated, that can be produced thanks to having scale. And India plays a vital role there in the world, and it's good for India, it's good for the world, right? So I think the scale that India has here is phenomenal, and it's great that also applies then on the application side, right? And I think as AI comes in more and more in applications, that will drive many benefits. I think for much innovation to come, where companies, Indian companies, can provide good value in India but also have a fantastic export opportunity.
