One can't talk about mobile technology without, well, mobility. And as it happens, mobility was a big theme on the first day of Mobile World Congress, the mobile industry's biggest event, held annually in Barcelona, Spain.

In this video segment, we speak with Mike Troiano, VP of IoT at AT&T (and, yes, that is a lot of letters). Troiano breaks down where mobile carriers like AT&T and others connect that thing in your pocket with the rest of the world.

IoT, or the internet of things, has been around for some time now. As such, the terminology has accumulated a bit of fuzziness. "How do we take technology from machinery?" asks Troiano. "We connect it to the internet and we make decisions based on that."

From connected cars to teched-out tractors, mobile providers can facilitate real-time decisions from afar, based off the locations of their machines and diagnostics. For example, when Hurricane Harvey ripped through Texas, Tesla pushed through a firmware update that gave its cars more range. No mechanic required.

But just because brands and marketers have this tech at their fingertips doesn't mean they should get complacent about how and where to deploy it.

"We oftentimes get the technology right quickly. We don't think about the impact of that technology across the enterprise," says Troiano. "And that's a really important to think [about] on the front end before we deploy these things."