Telco AI – what is it best for?

• In our recent Industry Vision survey, we asked about the primary focus of telco AI strategies
• Operational efficacy won the day – but only just

How should telcos think about their use of AI? What’s the key focus of their AI strategy? Is it purely or primarily about greater operational efficiencies, or is that the wrong way to look at AI’s potential?

This was one of the topics we asked TelecomTV’s DSP Leaders Council – a 100-plus strong body of industry leaders comprising senior executives from network operators, cloud service providers, technology developers and the analyst community – to address in a survey conducted during January 2026: The results of the survey have been published in the free-to-download 2026 version of the DSP Leaders Industry Vision Report. 

Specifically, we asked: What should be the single main focus of telco AI strategies?

This question was designed to be deliberately provoking – if we had included an option that pointed to a mix of focus areas and benefits, that would have obviously won the day. But we asked our councillors to avoid sitting on the fence and the results are very interesting.

As you can see from the chart above, by far the most popular choice of our admittedly limited options was ‘Improve operational efficiency’, which attracted support from 52% of our councillors, while just 10% selected the ‘Cut costs’ option. 

But a significant 34% of our council members believe the main focus of telco AI strategies should be to ‘Generate new revenue streams’, which suggests a decent slice of our council members have high hopes for telcos being able to create and successfully market AI and/or AI infrastructure services – something, of course, that a few, such as SK Telecom, Telenor and Swisscom (to name a few examples) have already started doing – see SKT pins 2026 hopes on AI after annus horribilis and Swisscom unveils sovereign AI assistant.

This is going to be a great topic to debate in 2026, especially as more and more companies and markets lean towards the concept of digital sovereign services, a trend that lends itself to the development and delivery of AI-related services by telcos. 

Plenty other hot topics were addressed in the survey and the resulting report, including security, 6G and sovereign services – see Sovereign services not a cash cow for all – report, Have telcos invested enough in security? and 6G resource anxiety grows.

Also addressed in the report are trends related to the telecom sector’s growth prospects, satellite direct-to-device (D2D) service timelines, ecosystem development, ‘fair share’ payments and the importance of various technical advances.

For all of our free-to-download reports, check out TelecomTV’s reports section. 

- Ray Le Maistre, Editorial Director, TelecomTV