• TelecomTV recently held its latest AI-Native Telco Summit
• We asked attendees how telcos can make the most of AI innovation
• Collaborating with vendors and cloud partners came out top – but not by much!

The best way for telcos to benefit from the innovation potential of artificial intelligence is to collaborate with vendors and cloud partners, according to the results of an audience poll conducted during TelecomTV’s recent AI-Native Telco Summit. 

We asked summit attendees: How can telcos best leverage AI innovation to improve operational efficiency and develop profitable new services? The 160 attendees who took the poll could choose as many of the seven options as they deemed relevant. 

As you can see from the graphic above, the option ‘Work with vendor and cloud partners to develop new AI capabilities’ attracted the most support, with 57% of voters selecting that option. It’s not surprising that this garnered majority support as telcos have been leaning heavily on their hyperscaler/big tech partners for their AI, and in particular their generative AI (GenAI), strategies – for example, see Vodafone turns to Google for massive AI expansion and KT strikes multibillion-dollar AI deal with Microsoft.

But other options also gained significant support, with 54% of our voters selecting ‘Build out AI infrastructure and services at the edge’ as a way in which telcos can best leverage AI innovation. This response is particularly interesting in light of the recent activity around the AI-RAN Alliance, a relatively new industry body that is focused on the potential of running radio access network and AI workloads on shared infrastructure – see Under the hood of the AI-RAN Alliance, SoftBank and Ericsson double down on AI-RAN and T-Mobile US, Nvidia take the AI-RAN initiative.

There was also significant support for the development of telco sector-specific GenAI platforms, something that the network operator founders of the Telco AI Alliance have been exploring. The option ‘Develop a telco-optimised large language model (LLM)’ attracted support from 49% of those who voted. 

It’s perhaps surprising that the option ‘Strengthen in-house development and software engineering teams’ garnered support from only 44% of voters, but no surprise that the option with the least amount of support was ‘Ensure 6G standards and specifications are built around AI’, as enthusiasm for specific 6G developments is waning across the industry as ‘generation fatigue’ sets in. 

You can catch up with all of the AI-Native Telco Summit sessions on demand and stay up to date with the main telco AI developments at our dedicated Telcos & AI channel.

- Ray Le Maistre, Editorial Director, TelecomTV