Weekly output: 5G platforms, AI in financial services, AI and supply chains, Kamala Harris on AI, AI infrastructure, Gmail’s AI calendar integration, Android 16, AI and information security

It’s a rare week when my work doesn’t touch on AI at all, but moderating panels at a conference devoted to that subject–and writing up two other talks there–helped ensure that AI figured in all but two of the items below.

3/10/2025: Practical means profitable: Telco talk about building services on 5G’s framework, Light Reading

My MWC Barcelona coverage for outside clients closed out with this writeup for this trade-pub client–my first there in a few months–of a panel in which telco executives talked about how they were building new lines of business on their 5G platforms.

Patreon readers, however, got one more post about MWC in which I shared three other highlights from the show.

3/10/2025: Banking on AI for personalized customer experiences, HumanX

The first panel I did at this conference–in Las Vegas for its first year, moving to San Francisco next year–had me quizzing Better.com’s Vishal Garg, Clearcover’s Kyle Nakatsuji, Honeybook’s Colleen Stauffer, Sunrise AI’s Deepak Shrivastava and S&P Global’s Bhavesh Dayalji about how they see AI changing customer service.

3/10/2025: AI-powered supply chains: From farm to table and beyond, HumanX

Since this panel–featuring Altana’s Peter Swartz, Fusion Fund’s Lu Zhang and Choco AI’s Daniel Khachab–focused on agriculture, I opened it by telling the audience that I found the subject particularly interesting because I eat food.

3/11/2025: Kamala Harris Urges Those Working on AI to Consider Trust, Empathy, PCMag

The former vice president–whom I last saw in person in October from much farther away–was a late addition to the conference agenda. I hustled to get from the airport to the conference hotel, check in, drop by bag and get over to the event in time to get a seat in the third row for the Sunday-evening program that ended with Harris.

3/11/2025: Rethinking infrastructure: Custom solutions for the AI era, HumanX

My big takeaway from the conversation I had onstage with Sid Sheth of d-Matrix and Ami Badani of Arm: Industry hype about AGI (“artificial general intelligence” that could replicate a human brain) is a distraction, and not a particularly helpful one at that.

3/11/2025: Gmail Gets AI Calendar Feature That Apple Added to Its Mail App in 2007, PCMag

I missed this Google announcement Monday but had to write about it once I realized that the feature Google touts as an AI advancement is something that Apple delivered with plain old software in Mac OS X Leopard 18 years ago.

3/13/2025: Android 16 Inches Toward a Launch With Accessibility-Focused Third Beta Release, PCMag

Google PR gave me an advance on the news of third beta release of Android 16.

3/14/2025: Ex-Facebook CISO Warns: 95% of Bugs in Your AI System Haven’t Been Invented Yet, PCMag

I always learn something when Alex Stamos talks about information security, and I was happy to share that with PCMag readers.

Yes, Europeans are worried about the United States

BARCELONA

Over the last two years or so of my travels to the right side of the Atlantic, I got used to anxious conversations with Europeans about the choice the United States would make in 2024. Every time, I reassured them that we were not going to give Donald Trump another shot.

Not only had we seen how badly he ran the country from 2017 to 2021, he had committed the unforgiveable offense of trying to overturn the 2020 election through deceit and the threat of force. We would open the other door.

Instead, American voters decided to open Door Number Stupid. So spending this week at MWC treated me to different conversations from the ones I hadn’t enjoyed over the previous two years.

The briefest feedback I got: “I’m sorry for you.”

Anxiety over the reach of American tech companies–unelected White House henchman Elon Musk’s SpaceX and its Starlink satellite-broadband service foremost among them–surfaced in multiple chats.

A publicist from the Netherlands aired out her unease at a greater length, concluding with her saying she had wiped out her Facebook presence.

And an executive from Berlin voiced his fear that Trump would simply not leave office in 2028. Reader: When a German voices their anxiety over a democratically-elected leader exploiting the machinery of government to end democracy, you should pay attention.

I don’t think I had great answers to these people.

But I do continue to believe that American voters repulsed by this turn of events are not without recourse.

And one early key test of American voters’ tolerance for Trump 2.0 will happen in my state on my state’s terms.

Virginia elects a governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, and the entirety of the House of Delegates in November. Congress can’t dictate how we run our own elections–I know this from picking up the not-well-paid side hustle of serving as an Arlington County election officer. Richmond, not Washington, calls those shots, and Democrats have a minimal majority in both houses of the General Assembly.

And the commonwealth has an outsized share of people in federal-government jobs now menaced by Musk’s “DOGE” government-disruption project.

But I also doubt that the Republican Party’s thin and fragile majorities in the House and Senate will sustain any attempt to enact sweeping restrictions on voting. That clears the way to cleaning house in Congress in 2026… and I wish I had a clear preview for 2028, but my own crystal ball shattered last year.

And whatever we can do to drag ourselves out of this ditch, we can’t change one fact about how our allies in Europe now see America: The word of the government of the United States is now worth no more than a Truth Social post. That will take a long time to unwind, if it’s the kind of malfunction that can ever be fixed.