But it was generally seen as a gimmick instead of desired before Apple made it look good. Even when the iPhone came out, one of the jokes was how the grid of icons looks like how a Windows user's desktop would look like when they didn't understand the filesystem.
What most people want from mobile technology is for it to work, not too expensively, and for it to get out of their way.
What most people want out of AI is for no leader to emerge and wield supremacy against the rest of us. People are afraid of it in ways they weren't afraid of mobile, so they're more willing to work together against whoever is in the lead.
Its more like an arms race and less like a utility. The disadvantage I face when my competition has better mobile coverage and bandwidth is minor. The disadvantage I face when my competition has better intelligence on tap is much more significant.
We don't really have the demand for as many telecom companies as actually exist in the world. There's a reason we just have one Whatsapp and one Instagram, not three or four almost-but-not-quite clones in every single country that mostly differ in branding. The reason for the current situation has mostly to do with regulation and traditional, enterprise, "obviously every country needs a separate local branch, because that's what mcDonalds does" thinking. Technology has very little to do with it.
This is why the telecom world now consist of equipment manufacturers, who do most of the hard tech stuff, and actual telecom companies, who operate the equipment, rig towers in their local country, and maybe write some glue code to integrate a core from vendor A, a billing system from vendor B and a CRM / corporate invoicing system from government-approved local vendor C.
Banking also works similarly, though modern Neobanks / Fintechs and bank consolidation are slowly dissolving the concept of national bank branches.