What do MWC and COBOL have in common? Two things, one obvious and one not. The obvious link is AI, which is the dominant conversation at MWC. The not-obvious one is that the so-called obvious is covering up the important and real stuff.
Let’s start with COBOL, which is an acronym for “Common Business-Oriented Language”. I’ve done a lot of COBOL programming in my career, and I’m confident I could still code in it if I wanted to bother. The current focus on COBOL is a result of claims that because AI has a new tool to translate COBOL to another language, it threatens the whole software industry, or at least threatens IBM’s mainframe incumbency. Nonsense.
COBOL is probably the easiest programming language to learn and use, because it has an almost English-language syntax. I’ve coded in a lot of languages, and I am of the firm belief that any competent programmer could learn it in a week and work in it confidently.
The reason that’s important is that if COBOL were an albatross hanging around the necks of CIOs in IBM shops, they could have easily addressed that by simply changing the code they already ran, or compiling the programs on a different platform. You don’t need AI translation of code, people, you can get COBOL compilers for everything from PCs to Linux servers, in both commercial (including IBM) and free/open-source form (try GnuCOBOL if you need something). So if somebody wants to flee a mainframe, and if COBOL programs were the barrier, they’ve had the pathway to leap that barrier from the first, and still have it, independent of AI.
So why all the hype about this? Some of it is simply the result of click-seeking; you need stories so you grab on to something that has click potential. More people read about threats than about hopeful developments; good takes care of itself but bad has to be managed. Some is more complicated.
Wall Street is driving a lot of this nonsense. IBM’s stock has been on a roll because IBM alone, of all the big AI players, has actually had the story straight from the first. They have the highest enterprise-agent self-hosting success rate according to enterprises. You’d love to have gotten in on the ground floor on their stock, but most probably believed the hype that IBM was a dinosaur. I was actually asked to write a story on that before the stock took off on AI success, and I refused because I knew that it was B.S. Anyway, hedge funds have another chance, and a profitable one. They hit IBM’s stock with short-selling, drive it down, and make money when they cover their shorts with now-lower-priced IBM stock. They then buy, and when IBM goes up again, they make more money. If they can encourage the IBM-COBOL-dinosaur hype, they increase the potential for a big IBM drop, and the money they’ll make. And in the Internet and the click-obsessed world it created, they can do that easily.
Nonsense pays, at least for some.
Which gets us to MWC. What is a conference like that intended to do? Publicize, sell. Vendors spend a lot of money exhibiting there, and buyers spend a fair piece of change attending it. All this investment has to come with a return. For vendors, it’s visibility, attention. For buyers, it’s education, exposure. For both, there has to be something compelling going on, or nobody will care. The easiest way to get that is to ride a good hype wave, which is why we have an MWC focus on the intersection of two. One, 6G, ties into the ever-present hope that the Next Big Thing in mobile will redeem telco capex. One, AI, ties into the current popular buzz. Link the two, as Nvidia has surely been working to do, and you have a Great Attractor.
What gets covered up, then? Besides the obvious and general answer, the truth? Behind the scenes, under the hype, there’s an alternate reality that happens to be at least related to the truth.
The problem with hype waves is that they crest and fall into the drink. That may be fine from a story perspective; the news that AI has died would be just as click-worthy as that it was going to kill you, your family and friends, and humanity in general. For vendors, though, it promises a stock crash that could destroy them, even though the hedge funds would make money on it. So, underneath it all, there’s stuff going on to build the Thing that Will Emerge From the Deep when the AI wave crashes. It may not be as dramatic as the original hype wave, but it could save a lot of vendor grief. So we need to know what it is.
I think it’s clear that there are a lot of players who believe that telcos need some form of business salvation. AI and 6G are the preferred pathways to that, but only because everyone wants a deus ex machina (for those not familiar with the phrase, the Oxford Dictionary defines it as “an unexpected power or event saving a seemingly hopeless situation, especially as a contrived plot device in a play or novel.”) sort of solution. That works in novels and plays, but not in the real world.
We hear that the issues with telcos, the barriers to AI, are data coherence, APIs, lack of skilled personnel, and so forth. All of that is true and false at the same time. Yes, those are issues, but not the issue. Every project faces them regularly. The solution is to make changes, spend money, and the issue is the “spend money” part. Could 6G revolutionize infrastructure? Yes, if telcos spend on it. Could AI transform telcos and enterprises? Yes, if they spend on it. The problem is that in order for that spending to make any business sense, there has to be a suitable return on investment. Make a 6G revolution, and nobody will be able to afford it, because we know based on 5G experience that you can’t “build it and they will come”, you have to wait till they want/need it, then build it. With AI, what all the stories come down to is that investing billions in AI models could make something real, but would it do what we’re already doing better, better enough, to pay those billions back?
6G revolutions would make the vendors happy, but telcos have already said they don’t want a 6G outcome that requires major infrastructure upgrades. So, no revolution. AI replacing humans would make the AI pundits, and probably the media, happy (up to when AI replaced them, at least), but suppose that a giant AI data center can do the job of a human? Is spending a billion to get a human outcome when humans are already in the jobs a smart move? Oh, you say, the data center could replace a lot of humans, but if that’s the case then where is the need for all this new AI investment coming from? Where are the cost savings so far? Sure all this MWC 6G stuff and AI-consciousness stuff is entertaining, but are we really talking about multi-billion investments justified by the fact that it’s fun to read about them?
API work, open-source elements, in 6G could eliminate the telco fears of integration and operations complexity. The same could open enterprise core business data for AI exploitation, safely. There are initiatives in progress that would do these things, some that are even aimed at doing them, but you’ll not likely hear about them because they’re defensive positions, things behind the attractive hype that’s intended to be the survival bunker for when the hype fails. Talk about them now and you’re shouting “The Emperor is buck naked!” Then your stock tanks, because the hype was the here and now, and the fallback is a step on a longer and more boring path.
The good news is that outside MWC (and not in COBOL, I’d put in), there’s real progress happening. A former OpenAI bigwig is reportedly starting a company (Arda) to automate manufacturing, and it will analyze video to create a “digital twin” of an environment, then train robotic elements to work within it. This is a rational use of AI to connect itself to real-world processes, a critical step to an optimum future. We also had news of an AT&T initiative to replace AI applications in netops that were based on giant LLMs hosted in the cloud, with small models hosted on their own resources. This is what enterprises have been talking about for AI all along.
Hype waves on 6G and AI are likely to leave us all high and dry, unless…unless somehow some of the incremental steps that are contemplated, even announced, accidentally turn out something incrementally useful, or some player gets smart and tries to do that deliberately. There are signs, both in announcements like the one I just cited, and others from Nvidia and AMD in their telco-related announcements, that there’s a chance of both. The question for MWC, and for the AI community, is whether this will happen in time, or whether the waves of 6G and AI will crash over them.
