IFA 2025: an AI-first show with five other defining themes

This edition of the Industry Checkpoint series focuses on consumer devices, highlighting how the market has changed in the last six months and its implications. The report considers four major developments: innovation expanding beyond smartphones to wearables and the smart home; smart glasses seeing a revival; chipmakers intensifying efforts with generative AI; and direct-to-device strategies increasingly becoming a regional play.

There is a wave of innovation across consumer devices, connectivity and digital services. Within digital services, three areas are capturing growing interest: digital gaming; generative AI; and extended reality (XR) and the metaverse. In this report we draw upon findings from our consumer survey to uncover insights that can help players in these ecosystems sharpen their competitive strategies and refine their commercial offerings.

Growth in AI consumption is creating commercial opportunities across the AI value chain. Over the past year, investment in AI has increasingly extended towards revenue-generating services and enterprise propositions, with operators assuming a broader range of roles across the AI value chain. Telcos in Asia Pacific are particularly active across multiple layers of the AI value chain. They account for 43% of those participating in the infrastructure layer and 38% in the model layer. This position reflects the combination of large and linguistically diverse markets, government-backed national and sovereign AI agendas, expanding AI infrastructure investment, and the scale of leading regional operators and technology ecosystems.