• TelecomTV recently published its latest Telcos & AI report
• It was based on a survey of executives from all parts of the telecom ecosystem and from all over the world
• We asked a broad range of questions, including one about the potential for telcos to drive major new revenue streams from AI 

For the telecom sector, AI is often discussed in the context of efficiency improvement and automated processes, but can it also be a catalyst for revenue growth? That’s one of the questions we asked as part of an industry survey conducted in late March and early April, the results of which were published in our recent DSP Leaders Report, Telcos & AI.

We asked our respondents – more than 200, from CEOs and chairs of the board to the troops in the engineering and customer care teams from vendors, telcos, integrators and more – Does AI offer telcos a sizeable new potential revenue stream? 

As you can see from the graphic above, the majority are optimistic – but only just, with 52% believing that AI can deliver sizeable incremental sales for service providers. 

While that is a majority, it’s not overwhelming and, perhaps, even surprisingly low.

Meanwhile, 20% of our respondents believe AI won’t be boosting telco top lines at all, while a further 28% aren’t sure. 

So you can’t accuse the telecom sector of being overly optimistic about the revenue potential of AI services and it’ll be interesting to see if this changes over time, as right now there are numerous announcements about how telcos are gearing up to provide AI resources or services on a commercial basis – the latest example is the news that Fastweb + Vodafone has launched FastwebAI Suite, which it describes as “a platform of generative artificial intelligence-based services and tools dedicated to businesses and public administrations” – see Fastweb + Vodafone becomes the first Italian telco to launch proprietary AI services for enterprises.

As part of the survey, we also sought our respondents’ views on the impact that AI is already having, and might have in the future, on telco operations, efficiencies and energy consumption, the potential of distributed AI infrastructure, telco AI partnerships and much more.

Telcos & AI is a free report that is available to download right now – just click on this link.

And to find out more and get some industry feedback on some of the report’s findings, check out this panel discussion, which features speakers from Appledore Research, ConnectiviTree, Orange Business and Supermicro. 

All of our DSP Leaders Report publications are free to download – check out the full range here.     

- Ray Le Maistre, Editorial Director, TelecomTV