GSMA, ETSI, IEEE and ITU invite innovators to develop AI systems that solve radio network engineering problems and deliver reliable answers grounded in telecoms standards

Doha: The GSMA’s Open Telco AI initiative has announced two competitions inviting telecom operators, AI researchers, developers and startups to advance the capabilities of AI for telecommunications. Developed in collaboration with GSMA, ETSI, IEEE, ITU and Huawei, the TelcoRetrieve and AI Agents for RAN Challenges address two important industry needs: enabling AI agents to solve complex network engineering problems and improving the accuracy of AI systems working with technical standards.

The GMSA-led TelcoRetrieve Challenge focuses on improving how AI systems find and use information from technical specifications, white papers and industrial reports. These documents span organisations including 3GPP, CAMARA, ETSI, GSMA, ITU, O-RAN and TM Forum.

Finding an accurate answer and tracing it to the relevant source remains a demanding task for engineers. TelcoRetrieve addresses this through an open, vendor-neutral retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline that connects AI-generated answers to 3GPP-specific source documents.

Participants will develop their approaches using the provided document collections, question sets and resources. The aim is to make telecom standards easier to access and use, helping operators to save time, reduce errors and bring new products and services to market faster.

To help innovators engage with the TelcoRetrieve Challenge, GSMA, ETSI, Huawei and IEEE are planning a dedicated webinar for 13 November. The one-hour session will feature expert presentations followed by a live Q&A, helping innovators prepare to take part and compete for a €25,000 prize pool and the opportunity to present their solutions at MWC27 Barcelona. AMD is providing the compute for the challenge.

The AI Agents for RAN Challenge invites participants to build agents that reason, use tools and solve engineering tasks through Giulia, an open-source radio network simulator developed by Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV). Tasks cover fault diagnosis, outage impact analysis, coverage and radio configuration, site placement and energy management. Agents must investigate network conditions, test possible interventions and account for how changes affect performance across the network.

The aim is to advance the AI capabilities needed for more autonomous radio network operations, helping operators improve service reliability, reduce operating costs and deliver better customer experience.

Ahead of the challenge, GSMA, ITU and IEEE will host a dedicated webinar on 18 November to introduce the AI Agents for RAN Challenge and explain how participants will use the Giulia simulator to investigate network scenarios, test interventions and develop solutions. The session will also outline how entries will be evaluated, with participants competing for a €30,000 prize pool.

The judging criteria for the challenges will evaluate entrants for the accuracy, efficiency, reasoning capability and security considerations of their models. Together, the competitions aim to accelerate the development of reliable and efficient telecom AI through shared resources, practical engineering use cases and verifiable evaluation.

Both competitions offer significant cash prizes, encouraging participation from across the global telecom and AI communities. The winners will be recognised at a dedicated awards ceremony at MWC27 Barcelona, bringing together industry leaders, researchers and innovators to celebrate advances in telecom AI and explore opportunities for collaboration.