The week in AI-native telco (17-23 Oct 2026)

• AI-native network evolution, autonomous operations and AI-RAN advances dominated telco developments throughout the week.
• The impact of AI on financial results, and proactive network management were also prominent themes.

Operators and vendors alike pushed further into AI-native networking this week, with trials of AI-managed radio access, autonomous network programmes and new operator strategies all making headlines.

Financial results from Nokia and Tele2 underlined the growing commercial weight of AI, while deployments ranging from fibre fault prediction to sovereign AI infrastructure showed the breadth of practical application under way across the industry.

So here are the main developments from the seven days that ended on Friday 23 October…

Saudi Arabia’s STC Group unveiled plans to evolve towards an AI-native network and autonomous operations by 2030 by embedding AI “directly into its network’s design and operations to support emerging digital services and improve reliability”. The telco noted in this announcement that it “continues to advance its network capabilities to support AI-driven applications and changing connectivity needs. The group is upgrading its core network, which manages user connections and delivers communications services. By integrating AI deeply into this infrastructure, STC Group aims to help the network adapt to changing service requirements and resolve issues with less manual intervention.” In a whitepaper, the operator “highlights how advances in AI and 5G-Advanced, the next stage of 5G, are increasing network complexity. Services such as AI-enabled calling and immersive communications require faster, more responsive connectivity. AI agents, software systems that carry out tasks on users’ behalf, also need networks to coordinate communications and computing resources around each task.” To address these requirements, STC plans to “develop the infrastructure needed to run AI, embed intelligence within network functions and automate more operations. These capabilities would help the network allocate resources more efficiently and recover from faults faster, while allowing engineers to focus on service improvement and oversight.”

To mark the start of its two-day customer event focused on its OSS and BSS portfolio, Ericsson announced an expanded collaboration with Australian operator Telstra that is focused on the “knowledge, trust and governance foundations needed to support the next stages of network autonomy”. The announcement comes a year after the companies announced a “collaboration programme to advance the telecom industry’s shift to autonomous networks”. Now the pair will convene and co-lead a joint working group (which aims to share its fundings with the industry via organisations such as the TM Forum) that will focus on three key areas of collaboration all linked to the concept of a ‘knowledge plane’: A common knowledge taxonomy; knowledge exchange and composition; and knowledge-grounded agency. Mark Sanders, Telstra’s chief architect, stated: “Autonomous networks require more than the automation of individual tasks. They depend on a shared understanding of what the network is, what it is expected to do and how much confidence can be placed in the knowledge supporting each decision. By working with Ericsson on common approaches to knowledge and trusted agency, we can help address these foundational challenges and contribute to the industry’s progress towards more interoperable and dependable network autonomy.”

The Swedish vendor has also struck a five-year strategic partnership agreement with Singtel to “advance Singapore’s 5G capabilities, accelerate the adoption of AI-native applications and deliver more reliable, intelligent connectivity for businesses and consumers”. The partners recently “made progress in applying AI to improve network performance,” noted Ericsson, explaining that “a live-network trial of AI-powered radio access network capabilities demonstrated a 19% improvement in throughput, highlighting the potential for AI to optimise network resources and manage growing traffic demands more efficiently.” Singtel Singapore’s CEO, Ng Tian Chong, noted: "We’ve built a strong 5G foundation for Singapore and turned advanced network capabilities into services that benefit our customers. But the demands on connectivity are changing rapidly. As AI becomes more embedded in how we live and work, networks will need to support far more complex applications, from autonomous machines and real-time analytics to the AI tools people use every day. Our priority is to make these capabilities more widely accessible and commercially viable, while continuing to strengthen the reliability, security and performance of our network. Through this partnership we’re ensuring Singapore’s connectivity infrastructure continues to evolve alongside the needs of its people and businesses, supporting new opportunities for innovation and growth in the AI era.”

In addition, Ericsson also announced that it has teamed up with researchers from two of the world’s most renowned engineering institutions – Sweden’s Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) and Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) – for a research and innovation initiative that will explore new positioning technologies and solutions enabled by AI and 6G.

Deutsche Telekom has deployed the VoiceAI Connect platform developed by Israeli communications software vendor Audiocodes to underpin its Voice AI Notes Mobile service for small and medium-sized businesses. “Voice AI Notes Mobile automatically records, transcribes and summarises business phone calls, helping employees spend less time on administrative tasks and more time focusing on customers and core business activities,” noted Audiocodes in this announcement, adding that its VoiceAI Connect system, which has been deployed in the telco’s T Cloud environment, “provides the real-time connectivity and orchestration layer between any voice network and AI services”. Claudia Buhne, VP of portfolio/business communication & collaboration at Deutsche Telekom Geschäftskunden, stated: “AudioCodes has been a trusted technology partner of Deutsche Telekom for many years, supporting our business communications services with reliable voice and data connectivity. VoiceAI Connect extends this collaboration into AI by seamlessly integrating and orchestrating our mobile network with Mistral AI services, while giving us the flexibility to bring new AI-powered capabilities to our customers quickly.”

Tele2’s CEO Nicholas Högberg has highlighted the growing value of AI to the north European operator in his third-quarter earnings letter to shareholders. “AI is creating significant value for us, in administration and network operations as well as customer relations,” noted Högberg. “The vast majority of the customer queries we receive are simple questions that AI can resolve with no waiting time, much appreciated by our customers. NPS [net promoter score] for our voice bot Anna is rising steadily, and she frees up time for our senior agents to handle the complex cases where customers want and need to talk to a person. We are also closely following the development of personal AI agents, which will change how customers compare and buy services. Whether the customer is a person or an AI agent, we need to be the best choice, giving customers more reasons to stay through a high-quality network, strong service and brands people love. Making it much easier to become and stay our customer has been a focus since the beginning of our transformation, and it will only become more important. We are not here to defend ourselves against AI. We are here to win more because of it.” His statement came as the operator, which has about 6.2 million consumer mobile customers across its operations in Sweden, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia, reported a 2% year-on-year increase in service revenues to 5.7bn Swedish krona (SEK) ($576m) and a 3% increase in “underlying” EBITDA after leases of SEK3.1bn ($313m) “driven by end-user service revenue growth and continued sharp cost control across all operations”.

Telenor has selected F5’s BIG-IP Next for Kubernetes as an intelligent AI service plane for its sovereign AI infrastructure, the secure networking tech specialist has announced. Telenor has been running its AI Factory platform for almost two years, helping Norwegian and European organisations to “access secure, high-performance AI services while maintaining control over where data is processed, stored and accessed,” stated F5, which noted that, as well as the relevant underlying hardware (in Telenor’s case, Nvidia GPUs) sovereign AI “requires an operational AI service plane that can govern where data flows, how tenants are isolated and how policy is enforced in real time”. It added: “Telenor AI Factory addresses growing European sovereignty requirements by combining Telenor’s national infrastructure and connectivity with Nvidia-powered AI infrastructure and F5’s intelligent traffic management, security and governance capabilities. WIth F5 BIG-IP Next for Kubernetes, Telenor can apply policy, visibility, tenant isolation and traffic control directly in the AI service path. In the future, Telenor also plans to leverage F5 technology to expand the service plane with token-aware governance and more advanced inference traffic optimisation as commercial AI services scale,” added the vendor, which has also recently secured a sovereign AI management deal with Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison (IOH) in Indonesia.

As well as working with Nokia and Nvidia on its AI-RAN strategy and trials – see Nvidia boasts greater AI-RAN and AI factory traction with telcos – T-Mobile US is also collaborating with Ericsson on the “new era” of wireless networking, which is about “making the network smarter” as well as adding more spectrum, sites and capacity. “That is what makes 5G-Advanced so important,” notes the US operator in this blog by chief network officer Ankur Kapoor. 5G-Advanced “is where we can put new intelligence to work today and prove the capabilities that will shape 6G. AI-RAN is a key part of that evolution, bringing AI directly into the radio network so it can learn from real-world conditions, make smarter decisions and adapt in real time,” adds Kapoor. He continues: “AI-RAN is a continuum, not a single product. Our north star is to use AI to make our network smarter and more efficient today, delivering tangible benefits for customers while building the foundation for an intelligent, distributed network that can power the next generation of AI applications. And we have made some great movement in this direction,” he adds, highlighting recent advances with Ericsson on AI-managed beamforming, now being used in “large-scale commercial trials using live network traffic. This is another major step in bringing practical AI deeper into the RAN, building on our earlier AI-RAN work with Ericsson, including AI-Native Link Adaptation, and continuing the network vision we laid out at Capital Markets Day in 2024.” According to T-Mobile US, AI-managed beamforming trials conducted in New York City achieved significant gains, especially during peak hours when customer demand is at its highest, with the operator achieving a 16% improvement in downlink user throughput, a 12% improvement in spectral efficiency and a 10% increase in downlink data volume.

NTT Docomo and its parent company, NTT Group, have developed a technology that “uses AI to optimally coordinate and control radio base station communications-processing workloads and the operation of distributed energy resources, including solar power generation and storage batteries”. In what it describes as a “world’s first demonstration at base stations using this technology,” NTT plans to “verify [its] effectiveness in increasing the use of renewable energy, supporting demand response (DR) during periods of tight electricity supply and demand, and improving communications service continuity during disasters.” The demo “will use workload shifting (WLS) technology, which moves communications processing workloads between base stations, together with Docomo’s energy management system (EMS) platform, which manages distributed energy resources such as solar power generation and storage batteries. Based on operating plans calculated by AI, NTT will control the communications load at each base station, while Docomo will control the storage batteries. This will enable the companies to coordinate and optimise communications and power equipment as an integrated system,” explained NTT.

Vodafone Spain, the Spanish operator owned by Zegona Communications, is using AI-based technology from Vigo, Spain-based Optare Solutions to predict likely problems in its fibre optic network infrastructure and remedy them before customer services are impacted. Using Optare’s AI system called Augura Tech, Vodafone Spain says it can analyse the service status of its fibre broadband customers and anticipate which customers are most likely to experience an outage, take preventative measures, and resolve the problem before the customer even notices it. In this announcement (in Spanish), the operator explained it deployed Optare’s solution in April, since when its “ability to anticipate and proactively address issues has contributed to a 25% reduction in customer equipment-related incidents, enabling a more stable connectivity experience and reducing the need for reactive interventions”. Julia Velasco, director of technology and operations at Vodafone Spain, stated: “Artificial intelligence is transforming the way we ensure the best customer experience. Thanks to this solution, we can analyse millions of signals from the network and customer devices to proactively identify situations that could lead to an incident and act before they occur.”

Nokia reported third-quarter results with comparable operating profit of €605m on Thursday, a 35% increase from €448m in the same period last year, driven by growth in AI and cloud technology. The Finnish vendor recorded about €1.5bn (US$1.7 billion) in new orders from AI and cloud customers, making up a significant chunk of the 9% sales growth posted in its latest figures. Network infrastructure net sales grew 15% year on year on a constant currency basis, led by IP networks growth of 43% and optical networks growth of 18%. Nokia saw slower growth across mobile, however, where net sales were up 5% year on year, but it remains Nokia’s biggest segment, with €2.9bn in revenue, and an increase in operating profit to €420m. President and CEO Justin Hotard said: “Team Nokia continues to deliver on our commitments as we execute against our strategy. In Q3, we grew net sales by 9% and improved comparable operating margin by 220 basis points. We continue to simplify our portfolio, and we are on track to complete the Infinera integration by the end of 2026, one year ahead of plan with €200m of net synergies. Nokia’s strengths are uniquely suited to meet growing demands for AI infrastructure that is larger, more distributed and hyperconnected. We are investing where we can differentiate and co-innovate with hyperscalers.” However, operating profit for its third quarter fell 22% year on year to €196m, and operating margin declined to 3.8% from 5.4% which Nokia chalked up to accelerated restructuring and integration costs that saw the vendor lose more 14,000 jobs between 2020 and this year.

- The staff, TelecomTV