AI in Telecom: 16 real deployments

Deploying AI agents to connect with customers as part of the largest cost transformation in the company's history

Using Decagon AI customer-service agent platform

Selling AI token subscription plans starting at 9.9 yuan for 10 million tokens

Selling AI token subscription plans starting at 9.9 yuan for 10 million tokens

Selling AI token subscription plans starting at 9.9 yuan for 10 million tokens

Reliance Jio unveiled Jio Call Agent and TeleFrame, embedding a 'Hey Jio' voice agent directly in its telecom network across multiple Indian languages for its 500M+ subscriber base.

Telus Digital deployed Tomato.ai's speech-to-speech model to alter offshore call-center agents' accents in real time, without disclosing the practice to customers.

Starlink deployed xAI's grok-voice-think-fast-1.0 low-latency voice model for phone sales and customer support.

Reported: 20% sales conversion rate and 70% autonomous resolution rate

Launched Token Factory unified AI platform for enterprises with 73 models including seven KT-run sovereign models and Auto Model Router for automatic model selection based on task type, quality, and cost

Reported: claims up to 25% cost savings

Deployed in-house AI agents as managed workers, each issued employee IDs, role assignments, and human supervisors whose seniority rises with the agent's autonomy, tracked for operating status, token use, and work history, and subject to suspension or retirement based on performance reviews

Reported: Secured ISO/IEC 42001 certification for internal AI agent management system

Deployed 400 H200 and 480 B300 GPUs across Astana and Almaty as part of a sovereign AI cluster under a $10B deal targeting 100,000 GPUs

Routing AI workloads to open-weight models to reduce inference costs

Reported: open models handling 40% of AT&T's AI workloads; routing to cheaper open models cut inference costs by roughly 56%

Integrating Auto Model Router, which selects an AI model per request based on task type, difficulty, and knowledge domain, into its Token Factory enterprise AI service

AI automation of service disconnections, cell-site location, maintenance triage, code writing, and service-problem management

Reported: employed ~131,000 in June 2026 after 8,000 cuts in 2025 and 2,100 more in H1 2026

Pivoting to open-source and Chinese AI models, favoring downloadable weights over expensive frontier APIs

SoftBank launched an OpenAI-powered 'Patching as a Service' providing vulnerability assessment, remediation planning and implementation advisory to the top 3,000 companies behind Japan's critical infrastructure, after internally validating the approach by running OpenAI's models across its own systems.