Partnership with tech firms to create locally-relevant, monetisable AI use cases: Indian telcos

Time of India

21-04-2025

NEW DELHI: Top executives of
Bharti Airtel
and
Reliance Jio
said partnerships between telecom carriers and technology firms and startups will become increasingly crucial to develop locally-relevant and monetisable artificial intelligence (AI) use cases and models.
'Telcos traditionally have had a strong ICT network, and the partners have a strong platform. I see both of them working together to pick up use cases that can be monetised, which can increase our efficacy. I would expect a partnership that can build India-specific models, which can better help our customers,' said Rashim Kapoor, executive vide president (core networks) and hub CTO, Airtel.
He spoke during a panel discussion at the eighth edition of the
ETTelecom 5G Congress 2025
.
Kapoor said Airtel has worked extensively to build in-house AI algorithms which are supporting a wide range of functions, including energy-saving in network operations and network testing. Similarly, he added that Airtel has built a strong AI-driven spam and scam control engine, and significant work has been done internally on go-to-market (GTM) strategy and on handling customer queries by call centres using this technology.
Kapil Ahuja, CEO (North), Jio, in turn, said the telecom company is experienced in operating and running networks, and is now building out AI infrastructure, including data centers, for enabling cost-effective operations.
'We are looking at how to bring the cost levels to a significantly lower level to drive its adoption. There are things we do, including through partnerships. Our overall strategy is moving toward AI-based networks and utilising the technology internally for our processes, and ensuring we enable all the enterprise customers as well,' Ahuja said.
'We believe we are strongly positioned to make AI affordable and take it to the next level in the country,' he added.
Jio has built its own AI platform, called 'JioBrain', which powers various in-house applications and ensures its employees are skilled to use the latest AI tools.
Airtel's partnership with Google is aimed at unique technology and telco AI solutions such as those in geospatial mapping with location intelligence, voice analytics trained across languages and marketing with high-precision ads targeting. Meanwhile, Jio Platforms (JPL), the telecom and digital services arm of Reliance Industries, is co-developing AI language models in partnership with Nvidia to build use cases in areas such as retail, healthcare, agriculture and education.
Separately, the Central government last year approved the national IndiaAI Mission with a financial outlay of ₹10,371.92-crore last year to catalyse the AI ecosystem in India. The initiative focuses on establishing computing capacity, datasets platform, skilling, and startup financing, among others.
Radhika Gupta, head of data acquisition, senior director,
GSMA
Intelligence, highlighted that general-purpose AI models such as OpenAI's GPT-4o perform below average vis-a-vis certain 3GPP specifications-compliant models for telecom-specific queries, indicating that the telecom industry needs to have a common set of practices and framework to fine-tune AI large language model (LLM) models for use cases and applications.
'Indian telcos should bring their use cases, AI queries, AI models, and test them against the GSMA Open-Telco LLM benchmark to see the accuracy of results before making a move to deploy it for either customer operations, marketing, or network optimisation,' Gupta said.
Anil Kumar Bhardwaj, DDG,
Department of Telecommunications
(DoT), said a focus group comprising GenAI companies – AMD, Meta, Microsoft, and Accenture – are working on recommendations for India, which will help create a policy framework for using AI and GenAI in telecom networks.
'The DoT and TRAI are also working on the quality of experience norm, compared to the quality of service norms earlier. We are now looking at real-time metadata for 5G networks. So all that change in regulation is being contemplated with the use of AI,' Bhardwaj added.
Ludvig Landgren, vice president (cloud software & services) and head (enterprise), Market Area South East Asia, Oceania and India,
Ericsson
, said while AI is not revolutionising telecom operations yet, the technology has a significant revenue generation potential in the future.
'It's not revolutionising operations yet, but it absolutely has the potential. Instead of conducting drive tests in India, AI can provide all the information. But maybe more attractive is the revenue side. The data is already there in the network, so the AI chatbot can take its life on its own and create billing and service offerings, and promote them. This is revenue creation,' Landgren said.
Sonica Bajaj, partner,
KPMG in India
, said AI and 5G have a symbiotic relationship. 'While we are seeing telcos use AI to promote 5G operations and make the networks more efficient, we also see an essential component of how AI is being deployed, and to leverage the benefits of AI, 5G is a must,' she said.
Bajaj moderated the panel discussion.