FEATURE: NETWORK INFRASTRUCTURE
As AI has come to the fore, we start hearing about cognitive cities which is a case of integrating AI into the city.
I believe in the future, we’ ll see more of what I’ d call autonomous cities with the use of Distributed Ledger Technologies( DLT) and AI agents.
Huawei Cloud is positioned as an AI pioneer in industries. Can you share how it’ s helping governments and enterprises in the region accelerate their intelligent transformation?
This is the direction countries will head in and we provide the solid foundation for them to be able to achieve that. However, we must recognise that not every country is transforming at the same pace.
I recently took part in a roundtable discussion about national cloud sovereignty and AI sovereignty, and we see countries from across the region – be it Africa, Middle East or Central Asia – all at different stages.
Despite this, the overall vision is heading in the same direction. Our direction of travel is moving towards how AI is used.
We see Huawei Cloud as not just being cloudnative but being AI-native. That means we can help customers deliver cloud sovereignty and AI sovereignty in-country. We believe this is key for every country to be able to adopt AI which is tailored to their own countries, languages, cultures and so on.
We’ re aiming to shorten the gap between experimentation and acceleration – and that’ s how Huawei is uniquely positioned.
Huawei has been recognised for developing local ICT talent. What are the latest initiatives you’ re leading to grow that ecosystem further?
Talent is the foundation of Digital Transformation and the right type of talent combined with the right skillset is what’ s needed.
What is unique about this region is its youth population. Pakistan for instance has an average age of approximately 26 and is the fifth largest population in the world.
Similarly, across the region, whether in the UAE or Saudi Arabia, there’ s a very large youth population.
This can be advantageous because the younger generation tend to adopt technology more natively than the older generation. We’ ve got to be able to enable that talent with the right type of tools and this is where Huawei comes in.
It’ s now our 10th year of our ICT talent development programme and we’ ve already had 200,000 students join. We have a 1,000,000 digital talents programme which will now include AI, cybersecurity and cloud technologies.
OUR DIRECTION OF TRAVEL IS MOVING TOWARDS HOW
AI IS USED.
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