At a show led by China’s telecom players, tokenisation, embodied AI and satellite connectivity sat at the centre of the agenda, each revealing how China’s AI and connectivity market is taking its own distinctive shape.
The industry has accepted the destination that is AI-driven autonomous networks. The challenge now is to build systems that operators can trust to make decisions across real networks. And to make every step create actual business benefits.
A global database of innovative telco consumer services beyond connectivity
STL Partners’ analysts share their bite-sized expert opinions on the key topics in telecoms in the last quarter
How the NaaS world is preparing for agentic AI and its impact on internal operations, customer relationships, security and partnering across the ecosystem.
How telcos can employ artificial intelligence to enrich their interactions with customers, while protecting their brands and reputations.
The Telco generative AI adoption tracker is a database of deployments of generative AI by telcos around the world. It also features STL’s assessment of key telcos’ progress with AI
How telcos are building revenue from AI-centric solutions for consumers, enterprises and the public sector.
As telcos deploy more resilient and programmable networks, they could become key suppliers to armed forces. Dual-purpose tech solutions by telcos are valuable also to the population and civilian critical services during extreme weather events or energy blackouts, as much as during military conflict.
As AI workloads push rack densities higher and liquid cooling becomes essential infrastructure, a fragmented vendor landscape is ripe for consolidation.
AI was again at the centre of MWC. But now telcos are focused on what they can practically achieve with AI rather than on boosting investor perception. Satellites, 5G standalone, sovereignty, security and quantum are other themes we noted in Barcelona.
Our telco AI data centre forecast examines the rise of AI factories alongside the evolution of network edge infrastructure, showing how AI-driven demand is accelerating growth in telco compute capacity. How will data sovereignty requirements and new industrial AI applications reshape the telco compute capacity landscape?
Following early AI investment, in 2021 SK Telecom announced its intention to become an AI company for the AI era. What actions has SK Telecom undertaken to this end? What role is AI playing across its business? And is AI paying off?
RAN autonomy will not deliver impact unless technical progress and value creation advance in parallel. Our dual-axis framework will help operators to assess where they are today, identify constraints across the lifecycle and the investments most likely to scale.
To deliver on their AI visions (especially agentic AI), operators must transform their data foundations and capabilities to avoid “garbage in, garbage out”. We identify the steps operators can take to get their data ready for AI on the journey towards level 4+ autonomy.
With recent advances in AI, smart homes may actually become smart, generating considerable value for homeowners, telcos and a broader ecosystem of device and solution providers.
In the first report in this series we identified the most promising opportunities for telcos to serve enterprise AI needs. This follow-up research focuses on the practical steps telcos must take to execute, differentiate and deliver impact for enterprises adopting AI.