• Revenue-generating strategies were at the heart of AI-native telco developments during the week spanning 26 September-2 October 2026
• B2B applications, sovereign AI, and network investment planning were also hot topics

As we noted last week, there’s so much going on in the AI-native telco world that we’ve decided to package all the main developments up into a weekly roundup that sports the highly imaginative title of the Week in AI-Native Telco (aka WANT). 

So here are the main developments from the seven days that ended on Friday 2 October…

Can telcos make money by billing customers for AI token consumption rather than data usage or voice minutes? The jury is out, but Singtel clearly thinks so, as it has become one of the first communications service providers to launch a token-as-a-service (TaaS) offering via RE:AI, the sovereign cloud unit of its Digital InfraCo division.  The Singapore network and digital infrastructure operator isn’t the first telco to try driving incremental revenues from the generation of AI tokens (the basic units of text, code or data that an AI model processes or generates), China’s three main telcos are ahead of the game in that respect. But it is certainly an AI-native telco pioneer with its TaaS offering, which the operator describes as “a fully managed service which provides enterprises with access to AI models, scalable infrastructure, orchestration and governance capabilities through a flexible, token-based consumption model”. Read the full story. 

Globe Telecom, the largest mobile operator by customer numbers in the Philippines, says it has been measuring the financial benefits of its AI initiatives and that it has achieved a 2.8x return on its AI investments to date. The telco, which ended June with 67.7 million mobile and 2.4 million fixed broadband customers, is in growth mode – it generated revenues of 85.4bn Philippine pesos (PHP) ($1.36bn) and EBITDA of PHP44.9bn ($710m) in the first half of 2026, both up by 6% compared with the same period a year earlier – and has long been looking for ways to improve its top and bottom lines through the deployment of AI tools. As long ago as May 2024 it made Anton Reynaldo Bonifacio its chief AI officer, and then most recently appointed him as chief intelligence and trust officer (CITO), with responsibility for AI, data, cybersecurity and digital policy. Globe’s AI investments have been modest to date but, according to the operator, they are paying off, as it believes it has achieved PHP1.2bn ($19.2m) in “measurable benefits from its generative AI (GenAI) and AI and machine learning (AI/ML) initiatives as of August 2026… reflecting Globe’s growing focus on measuring AI through tangible business outcomes rather than adoption alone”. Read the full story. 

BT Group’s B2B division, BT Business, has launched a new solution aimed at giving UK businesses access to a suite of secure and practical AI solutions. With the launch of AI from BT, the UK telco says it hopes to help UK businesses adopt AI with confidence on the back of research it commissioned, which found that more than half (56%) of small business owners say they are not seeing the full potential of AI. BT is also launching a free AI Adoption Hub, which will provide practical guides, prompt packs, expert insights, and real-world examples of businesses using AI, with the aim of giving businesses the confidence to unlock the value of AI and work more smartly and safely. Jon James, CEO at BT Business, said: “AI has the potential to be a huge boost to small businesses and to drive the UK’s growth, but many businesses are struggling to know how to begin and how to adopt simply and securely. That's why BT – the UK’s most trusted network for business – has created AI from BT: A portfolio of practical, secure AI solutions backed by BT's expertise and support.”

Phone calls remain the number one way customers prefer to contact a business, so it comes as no surprise that the first solution BT Business is launching as part of its new AI portfolio is AI Receptionist, which helps businesses manage customer enquiries around the clock. BT found that 75% of potential customers will give businesses three call attempts before giving up on them. Further research from BT, based on the results of a poll conducted by Censuswide, found small businesses are struggling to keep up with customer enquiries and are losing out on growth as a result, with two-thirds (67%) saying they miss at least one call on an average day that they believe results in lost business: BT estimates that revenues lost as a result of those missed calls amounts to £3.7bn per year. AI Receptionist answers calls 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and can handle routine enquiries, according to BT, whilst also offering simplified appointment management and the ability to integrate with Outlook and Google Calendar. It can also transcribe conversations and generate insights from customer interactions. It will be available for businesses on flexible contracts through a self-service portal and can work on any UK fixed or mobile network.

Bell Canada is teaming up with Cisco to collaborate on a sovereign AI infrastructure offering for Canada that brings together the telco’s datacentre, network and operations capabilities with Cisco’s AI, security, observability, infrastructure monitoring and management, and Sovereign Critical Infrastructure technologies. According to Bell Canada, the partners will “focus on solution architectures that can support different AI workloads, including training and inference, while giving customers more choice and control over where critical systems and data are located, secured and managed.” The collaboration will focus on three core areas, namely: Building a Canadian platform for sovereign AI; supporting modular AI infrastructure deployments; and developing flexible commercial models. John Watson, the operator’s group president for business markets, Bell Cyber, AI Fabric and Ateko, stated: “Bell is focused on helping turn sovereign AI from ambition into infrastructure Canadian organisations can use. That requires secure Canadian datacentre capacity, high-performance connectivity, operational expertise and trusted technology working together. Through this collaboration with Cisco, we will work to make it easier to deploy and scale sovereign AI infrastructure for customers that need greater control, resilience and confidence in the systems behind their most critical workloads." Bell Canada unveiled its AI fabric strategy in May 2025 and has since then been developing partnerships with other Canadian firms, such as AI developer Cohere and AI infrastructure specialist Buzz High Performance Computing.

SoftBank Group, the global tech and infrastructure investment firm and parent company of Japanese telco SoftBank Corp, has completed its three-stage investment in OpenAI with a $10bn transaction. Its total investment in OpenAI, which has reportedly postponed the launch of its Astra 6.1 model due to safety concerns, has now reached $64.6bn and its stake in the AI giant has now reached 13%. 

And there’s more from SoftBank Group… The company has completed its acquisition of infrastructure asset manager DigitalBridge – which manages investments in datacentres, mobile towers, fibre access networks, small cells and network edge infrastructure – in a deal valued at $3.1bn: Speculation about the move first surfaced at the end of 2025. DigitalBridge is now a controlled subsidiary of SoftBank Group and will “continue to operate as a separately managed platform, led by Marc Ganzi,” noted SoftBank. 

Only weeks after Totogi CEO Danielle Rios told the audience at the AI-Native Telco Forum in Düsseldorf about how it’s important for mobile operators to use AI to better understand how their networks deliver value and how best to allocate capex, the vendor has announced that Viva Bolivia, the third-largest operator in the Latin American country, is to use the Totogi Ontology platform to allocate network investment “based on the revenue attributable to each cell site, not capacity metrics alone”. The vendor explained: “The Totogi Ontology connects Viva’s commercial and network systems, including vendor and homegrown applications running on-premises and in the Microsoft Azure public cloud, into one model of the business that decisions can run on, without replacing any of them. The ontology sees the whole business, all sites, all the time, and because the model is reusable, network investment is the first decision it improves, not the last. With that model, cost to serve, once known only as a company-wide total, becomes visible per customer and per site.” The telco’s CEO, Ryan Alvarez, noted: “Every vendor says they do AI. Totogi is the only one whose AI actually understands how our business works. For us, this was never just about the network. It tells us where we actually make money and why, and gives us the foundation to make decisions that grow our business.”

Samsung Electronics and five affiliates have announced a joint investment of $1bn in Helix Digital Infrastructure, the AI infrastructure startup that was launched in June with $10bn in capital from anchor investors Nvidia, private equity firm KKR, the Kuwait Investment Authority (KIA) and power-generation giant Vistra. Helix, which appointed former Amazon Web Services (AWS) chief Adam Selipsky as CEO, is, noted Samsung, an “AI-enabling infrastructure provider that is designed to deliver integrated solutions across the entire value chain, including hyperscale datacentre development and operations, power generation (covering both baseload and flexible energy sources), transmission and distribution infrastructure, and fibre-optic networks. Through Helix, hyperscalers can rapidly secure the large-scale, comprehensive infrastructure required to keep pace with exponentially growing AI demands,” added Samsung.

- The staff, TelecomTV