YOU ARE AT:5GQualcomm, Aramco Digital focus on edge AI for industrial IoT
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Qualcomm, Aramco Digital focus on edge AI for industrial IoT

Juan Pedro Tomás
By Juan Pedro Tomás
5GChips - SemiconductorIndustry 4.0IoT

The agreement between Qualcomm and Aramco Digital was formalized during the Saudi-US Investment Forum in Riyadh

In sum – what you need to know:

Qualcomm and Aramco Digital join forces on industrial edge AI – The pair will co-develop AI-powered industrial IoT solutions using Qualcomm’s hardware and Aramco Digital’s 450 MHz 5G network.

Edge AI to power Saudi industrial use cases – The partnership targets key applications such as predictive maintenance, asset monitoring, digital worker tools and visual anomaly detection.

AI model updates at the edge – The collaboration includes enabling the deployment, management and updating of AI models directly on edge devices connected via Aramco Digital’s private 5G network.

Qualcomm Technologies and Saudi firm Aramco Digital have announced plans to form a strategic collaboration focused on developing, deploying and commercializing edge AI and industrial IoT technologies.

In a release, Qualcomm said that the partnership aims to advance the digital transformation of key industries across Saudi Arabia through innovative AI-driven solutions.

Under this initiative, Aramco Digital will lead efforts to create and bring to market a portfolio of advanced edge AI industrial devices and end-to-end solutions, leveraging Qualcomm Technologies’ hardware and services. These solutions are tailored to meet sector-specific needs across Saudi Arabia, targeting improvements in efficiency, productivity, safety, sustainability and innovation — supporting use cases like predictive maintenance, asset monitoring, visual anomaly detection and digital worker tools.

The U.S company noted that a key feature of the collaboration is the integration of Aramco Digital’s 450 MHz 5G industrial network, which will support connectivity for AI-powered edge devices such as drones, cameras, sensors, robots and rugged industrial equipment. Both companies will work together to enable deployment, management, and updating of AI models on Aramco Digital’s edge devices.

“This collaboration with Aramco Digital highlights our shared commitment to advancing edge AI and 5G innovation,” said Cristiano Amon, president and CEO of Qualcomm. “Combining Qualcomm’s strengths in on-device AI, wireless technology, and energy-efficient computing with Aramco Digital’s industrial expertise and 5G infrastructure will pave the way for next-generation industrial IoT solutions across Saudi Arabia.”

“This MoU reflects Aramco Digital’s ongoing mission to accelerate the Kingdom’s digital transformation in line with Vision 2030,” said Nabil Al Nuiam, CEO of Aramco Digital. “Through advanced AI and 5G technologies, we aim to build smarter, safer, and more efficient industrial systems, reinforcing our leadership in digital innovation.”

The agreement was formalized during the Saudi-US Investment Forum in Riyadh, held in conjunction with the official visit of U.S. President Donald Trump to Saudi Arabia.

In September 2024, Qualcomm Technologies and Aramco Digital had announced what it claimed to be the world’s first processors with native support for 5G in 450 MHz spectrum.

The chipmaker had noted that its advanced IoT processors, Qualcomm QCS8550 and QCS6490, provide ubiquitous and resilient coverage that will be necessary to connect millions of intelligent edge devices. Qualcomm Technologies added that it provides comprehensive 5G modem-to-RF solutions consisting of the modem, RF transceiver, TX power amplifier, RX low-noise amplifiers, filters, duplexers and switches, helping optimize the performance and accelerate the development of 450 MHz enabled IoT devices including industrial handhelds and ruggedized smartphones.

Qualcomm and Aramco also announced an initiative dubbed “Design in Saudi Arabia,” a new accelerator program to support AI and IoT startups to drive industrial innovation and digital transformation.

Qualcomm, through its subsidiary Qualcomm Technologies, Aramco and Saudi Arabia’s Research, Development and Innovation Authority (RDIA) were planning to launch this initiative that aims to support startups that are adopting AI, IoT and wireless technologies for industrial use cases.

Qualcommn noted that this initiative aims to support early-stage startups in the high-tech sector by guiding them from product design and development to commercialization. It aims to provide a comprehensive suite of support that includes technical assistance, business coaching and intellectual property (IP) training. Should this initiative materialize, startups would gain access to resources such as Qualcomm Technologies and Aramco’s industrial experience and RDIA’s strategic guidance.

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ABOUT AUTHOR

Juan Pedro Tomás
Juan Pedro Tomás
Juan Pedro covers Global Carriers and Global Enterprise IoT. Prior to RCR, Juan Pedro worked for Business News Americas, covering telecoms and IT news in the Latin American markets. He also worked for Telecompaper as their Regional Editor for Latin America and Asia/Pacific. Juan Pedro has also contributed to Latin Trade magazine as the publication's correspondent in Argentina and with political risk consultancy firm Exclusive Analysis, writing reports and providing political and economic information from certain Latin American markets. He has a degree in International Relations and a master in Journalism and is married with two kids.

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Google Cloud Next shows how network operators and vendors are using AI for telecom

We already know that businesses are pushing hard to figure out how artificial intelligence can benefit them. In telecom specifically, an Nvidia survey earlier this year found that 37% of respondents said their companies were investing in AI for telecom to improve network planning and operations, and 33% said that there had already been investments in AI for telecom field operations.

At this week’s Google Cloud Next event, some of Google Cloud’s specific work on advancing the use of AI for telecom is being highlighted, as well as AI for enterprises in other verticals. Here are three perspectives on how companies are leveraging Google Cloud AI for telecom.

–Verizon has integrated Google Cloud’s generative AI into customer operations, which the two companies said has led to “95% comprehensive answerability for customer inquiries” and “demonstrably more efficient and effective customer care interactions.” Verizon is making use of a Google Cloud conversational AI agent that leverages Google Cloud’s Vertex AI, Gemini models and Agent Assist Panel in order to give its customer service reps “real-time, context-aware, and personalized answers” to customer questions, as opposed to the reps having to do manual searches of knowledge bases.

Verizon has deployed this across 28,000 customer care reps and retail stores. Additional features like automated summaries of conversations, and automated follow-up action reminders, are also in the process of being rolled out. Those internal AI agents are in addition to several genAI tools that are directly customer-facing and use Google’s Gemini models for virtual assistants which use natural language.

Background image: Verizon

“Our collaboration with Google Cloud and the integration of Gemini into our customer care platforms mark a significant advancement in our commitment to providing exceptional customer experiences,” said Sampath Sowmyanarayan, CEO of Verizon Consumer. “The tangible results demonstrate the power of AI to enhance efficiency and empower our customer care teams.”

“The impact of Gemini on Verizon’s customer service operations is a testament to our deep partnership and Verizon’s commitment to continued innovation,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud. “These results demonstrate the potential of AI to not just improve operations, but to create more meaningful and helpful interactions for customers everywhere, ultimately driving significant value for businesses.”

-“We’re really trying hard to build an autonomous network which is going to be obviously driven by AI more and more over time,” said David Sauvageau, director of software development, data and AI for Bell Canada, in a briefing call prior to Google Cloud Next.

In general, he continued, the network operator see AI as a “fundamental building block for the future of telecom, for innovation, for customer operations and for network operations.”

He said in the short-term, Bell Canada is prioritizing AI applications for telecom which “really focus on optimizing our customer experience and network ops.” For the latter in particular, Sauvageau said, “Our goal is really to leverage all the data that we have available in AI in order to predict and prevent issues before they actually impact our customers. So, really moving from reactive to preventive customer experience.”

Additionally, Sauvageau said, that Bell Canada believes AI is crucial for managing the increased complexity of telecom networks. “We need to be much more efficient, [and have] have faster innovations in areas like edge computing, digital twin, 6G or any other future network technologies. And ultimately … our goal is to build and accelerate the development of our AI-powered autonomous networks.”

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Autonomy is both about enabling differentiated connectivity at scale, he said, and monetization of that differentiated connectivity. At this year’s Mobile World Congress Barcelona, one of the things Ericsson spotlights was how it integrates its service orchestration with Google Cloud and its Vertex AI, Teslaru noted.

It’s now possible, he said, for a user to express their intent in natural language: A request to configure a specific type of connectivity to, say, a hospital, over a dedicated slice. “You can have Gemini interpret that intent and break it into service orders. … Then AI agents can take over these service orders and take them into execution, and also observe the results, so we can take corrective action autonomously,” he said.

So ultimately, then, network autonomy is about delivering personalized (or differentiated) connectivity with efficiency, while also doing so at a scale that means more effective and large-scale monetization.

Google Cloud emphasizes AI agents for telecom

Erwan Menard, director (outbound) of product management for cloud AI at Google Cloud, said that “When we look ahead, we envision networks that can largely manage themselves through the use of intelligent software agents.” He continued: “Think of these agents as digital experts that can automatically handle tasks like network configuration, problem solving and resource allocation.This would free up telcos from any routine operational burden, allowing human experts to focus on innovation and new services, ultimately leading to greater efficiency and productivity in network operations.”

In particular, he emphasized, telecoms face the unique challenge of having a “mission-critical duty to maintain knowledge over technologies which could be in service for decades. So the notion of being able to tap accurately through the knowledge of the company to help onboard a new resource or to assist somebody who has a decision to make—technical or business—is quite an important challenge in the telecom industry.” Google Cloud’s Google Agentspace was designed for such knowledge-heavy industries, Menard continued, to retrieve information across multiple systems with the idea of using “agentic workflows to be able to invest a new way of work.”

This week, the company is spotlighting its a new Agent Gallery, so that employees across the telecom organization can get personalized suggestions on which AI agents would be useful to them—either out-of-the-box from Google Cloud, agents built by the company or third-party AI agents. Google Cloud is also offering the ability to design and build agents with a no-code interface, in which people can essentially walk through a series of steps and “convert that sequence into an agent that then becomes your personalized assistant,” Menard explained.

 

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