David Wang, Huawei Executive Director and Chairman of the ICT Infrastructure Managing Board, believes that AI-armed smartphones will play a huge role in smartphone shipments this year. According to the executive, such devices will account for 11% of smartphone shipments in 2024.
Wang shared it during a keynote speech in Shanghai this week during the Global 5G-A Commercial Pilot Program. Nonetheless, he noted that aside from the addition of AI, there will also be improvements in other connectivity sections of smartphones.
“We will soon see a huge boost to traffic from AI,” Wang said. “At the same time, 5G-A networks will be able to provide higher speeds, lower latency, and greater capacity to meet the network demands of the AI era.”
The prediction came amid the growing numbers of brands jumping on the AI train in the past months after the boom of the ChatGPT. Now, several companies, including Samsung, offer generative AI in their devices. Chinese smartphone products with AI capabilities (ranging from generative AI to AI-enhanced camera systems) are also multiplying. The number of these smartphones further surged after Google collaborated with brands like Oppo and OnePlus and announced that its Gemini AI can now be accessed through the Google Messages app on devices meeting certain requirements.
Huawei, on the other hand, unveiled the HarmonyOS NEXT, an Android apps-free unified system with built-in AI. The company plans to introduce AI directly into the system, which it will call “Harmony Intelligence.” Some of the features and capabilities expected from the AI include AI image generation with some basic editing abilities, speech AI enhancement, AI alternative text audio descriptions, form filling, image and text translation, and more.
With all this, Wang’s prediction is not impossible, especially with Huawei owning a huge percentage of China’s smartphone market. Recently, the company proved this once again, with a Counterpoint Research report revealing that it gained a 42.4% YoY increase in its smartphone sales in China between May and June.
