GSMA launches Open Telco AI to accelerate development of telco?grade AI
MWN-AI** Summary
The GSMA has launched Open Telco AI, a significant initiative aimed at advancing telco-grade AI through global collaboration among telecommunications operators, AI developers, vendors, and academic institutions. This initiative seeks to address the current shortcomings of general-purpose AI models in telecommunications, which often struggle to perform specific tasks such as interpreting network data or automating operations effectively. Despite the rapid progress of frontier AI models, only 16% of telecom GenAI applications have been geared towards network operations, highlighting a critical gap in industry-specific solutions.
Open Telco AI aims to bridge this gap by creating a community-driven platform that offers access to telco-focused models, data, and computational resources. The initiative features a new portal—GSMA.com/open-telco-ai—where participants can contribute to and utilize these resources. Foundational supporters of this initiative, including AT&T and AMD, are providing vital contributions—AT&T is releasing a suite of open telco models trained on publicly available data, ensuring adaptability for various scales, while AMD is supplying the necessary computing power through its GPU platforms.
Open Telco also incorporates community-driven programs, such as the AI Telco Troubleshooting Challenge, to engage developers in solving real-world telecom-related problems. Notably, the Telco Capability Index will track progress by assessing model performance on telecom-specific benchmarks.
With participation from numerous partners, including academic institutions and major corporations, Open Telco AI is poised to create a robust foundation for developing sophisticated AI models that can meet the demanding requirements of the telecommunications industry, paving the way for more intelligent, automated networks.
MWN-AI** Analysis
The GSMA's recent launch of Open Telco AI marks a pivotal moment in the telecommunications industry's embrace of artificial intelligence. This initiative addresses a critical gap in AI applications within telecom, as traditional models have struggled to handle the unique complexities of telecom network data and operational needs. As only 16% of telecoms have deployed generative AI in network operations, the launch of Open Telco AI represents an opportunity for telecommunications companies to enhance operational efficiency through targeted AI solutions.
Investors and industry stakeholders should focus on companies actively participating in this collaborative framework, particularly AT&T and AMD, which are foundational to this initiative. AT&T is leading the development of open, telco-specific AI models, while AMD is providing the necessary computational power. This synergy could accelerate the adoption of telco-grade AI models that foster better customer experiences and operational efficiencies.
Moreover, the initiative's commitment to open collaboration through shared models, data, and benchmarks is expected to drive a shift in standard practices within the telecom sector. By establishing a community-driven approach, the GSMA aims to bridge the performance gap of existing AI models, paving the way for significant advancements in areas like network troubleshooting and standards interpretation.
Market participants should consider the implications of this move as it may lead to a ripple effect across various sectors, including finance and healthcare, which can adopt similar collaborative frameworks. As telecom companies start to see tangible results from their AI investments, this could translate into improved market valuations and increased investor interest.
In summary, the launch of Open Telco AI offers a robust growth opportunity for telecom players willing to innovate and collaborate. Investors should monitor developments closely and consider positioning themselves in companies engaged in this transformative initiative, as successful implementation of telco-grade AI could redefine operational paradigms in the industry.
**MWN-AI Summary and Analysis is based on asking OpenAI to summarize and analyze this news release.
PR Newswire
New initiative is supported by open-telco models, including a new family of models from AT&T, compute from AMD and TensorWave, datasets from researchers and a new portal for industry contribution and collaboration via GSMA.com/open-telco-ai
BARCELONA, March 2, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- GSMA today launched Open Telco AI, a global industry initiative designed to accelerate telco-grade AI through open collaboration across operators, vendors, AI developers and academic institutions. The launch introduces a new portal for telco open models, data, compute and tools to accelerate the development and evaluation of telco-focused AI models, accessed via GSMA.com/open-telco-ai.
While frontier AI models have advanced rapidly, they continue to underperform on telecom specific tasks. Many general-purpose models struggle to interpret network data, understand standards documentation, or automate network operations with sufficient accuracy. This performance gap limits progress: only 16% of telecoms GenAI deployments1 have been applied to network operations.
Open Telco AI meets this challenge by uniting industry and academic partners to build the foundations of telco?grade AI models, data, compute, benchmarks and community. Progress is tracked through the Telco Capability Index, which measures model performance across an expanding set of telecom?specific tasks.
As founding supporters of Open Telco AI, AT&T and AMD are making significant contributions. AT&T is releasing a family of open telco-models developed and trained on open, publicly available data to be hardware and cloud?agnostic, demonstrating that AI can deliver value across projects of any size and with varying levels of compute resources. AMD is providing compute capacity for model training, fine?tuning, inference and evaluation through its GPU platforms, cloud partner TensorWave and open toolchains.
The initiative is also supported by community programmes that bring together developers, researchers and operators to solve real-world telecom?AI problems. This includes competitions such as the AI Telco Troubleshooting Challenge which attracted over 1,000 registrations and will announce its winners at MWC26 Barcelona.
Louis Powell, Director of AI Initiatives, GSMA, said: "Today's AI models still fall short of the complexity, precision and reliability the telecom industry demands. Put simply, AI does not yet speak telco and operators are often deploying technology that cannot meet the required levels of accuracy, safety or efficiency. Establishing clear benchmarks and collaborating across the industry on datasets, models and agentic systems is essential. Open Telco AI provides a shared foundation designed to close this gap, an approach that other regulated sectors such as finance and healthcare can follow."
"Telco networks are among the most demanding and regulated environments for AI and moving from promising demos to telco-grade performance requires an open foundation for data, workloads and compute," said Philip Guido, executive vice president and chief commercial officer, AMD. "Through Open Telco AI, with GSMA and AT&T, AMD delivers the enterprise and AI compute needed to train, fine-tune and run open, telco-grade models efficiently from core to edge."
Andy Markus, Chief Data and AI Officer at AT&T, said: "The telecom industry needs AI that understands the realities of networks – not only generic models repurposed for telco tasks. Through Open Telco AI, AT&T is helping build the datasets, models and evaluation frameworks that make telco?grade AI possible at scale. By contributing our expertise and shaping realistic test environments, we're demonstrating how generative and agentic AI can improve customer experience, reduce operational friction and ultimately create new value. This collaboration with GSMA is accelerating the industry's path toward intelligent, automated networks."
Building the Open Foundations of Telco-Grade AI
The new portal will support the co?creation of the essential building blocks for telco?grade AI, including:
- Telco Models: High performance open weight models designed for telecom tasks, from network troubleshooting to standards interpretation, including modelsof multiple sizes and architectures from AT&T, a radio-frequency language model from Khalifa University called RFGPT and a Large Telco Model (LTM) from AdaptKey AI built on NVIDIA Nemotron.
- Open Data: A library of knowledge graphs, embeddings, and fine-tuning datasets of text, logs, and curated standards material from GSMA, Huawei Technologies France, Khalifa University, Mantis NLP, NetoAI, Pleias, Purdue University, The University of Texas at Dallas, University of Leeds and Yale University, and pipelines for generating synthetic data from NVIDIA.
- Compute: Access to compute and open toolchain for projects training and inferencing open models via AMD and TensorWave.
- Benchmarks: A leaderboard assessing model performance on seven telecom?specific benchmarks, along with tools for evaluating and submitting models from local environments.
- Community: Resources, challenges and engagement activities to encourage collaboration, including the AI Telco Troubleshooting Challenge and Agentic Challenge.
The Open Telco AI initiative is supported by a host of valued contributing partners that have submitted data, models, and use cases including AMD, AT&T, Datumo, Huawei Technologies France, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, KDDI, Khalifa University, KPN, LGU+, Mantis NLP, NetoAI, North Carolina State University, NVIDIA Orange, Ooredoo, Pleias, Purdue University, RelationalAI, SK Telecom, Softbank, Swisscom, TensorWave, Turkcell, University of Leeds, University of Texas at Dallas, and Yale University. Open Telco AI also has the support of valued participants partners including Adaptive ML, BMC, China Telecom, China Unicom, China Mobile, Deutsche Telekom, DU, e& UAE, Google Cloud, IBM, Liberty Global, Queens University, Telefónica and Vodafone.
For more information, and to register interest, new partners can visit GSMA.com/open-telco-ai.
[1] Source: GSMA Intelligence, Telco AI: State of the Market, Q4 2025, (published January 2026)
About GSMA
The GSMA is a global organisation unifying the mobile ecosystem to discover, develop and deliver innovation foundational to positive business environments and societal change. Our vision is to unlock the full power of connectivity so that people, industry, and society thrive. Representing mobile operators and organisations across the mobile ecosystem and adjacent industries, the GSMA delivers for its members across three broad pillars: Connectivity for Good, Industry Services and Solutions, and Outreach. This activity includes advancing policy, tackling today's biggest societal challenges, underpinning the technology and interoperability that make mobile work, and providing the world's largest platform to convene the mobile ecosystem at the MWC and M360 series of events.
We invite you to find out more at gsma.com
About AMD
AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) drives innovation in high-performance and AI computing to solve the world's most important challenges. Today, AMD technology powers billions of experiences across cloud and AI infrastructure, embedded systems, AI PCs and gaming. With a broad portfolio of AI-optimized CPUs, GPUs, networking and software, AMD delivers full-stack AI solutions that provide the performance and scalability needed for a new era of intelligent computing. Learn more at www.amd.com.
About AT&T
AT&T helps more than 100 million U.S. families, friends and neighbors, plus nearly 2.5 million businesses, connect to greater possibility. From the first phone call 140+ years ago to its 5G wireless and multi-gig internet offerings today, @ATT innovates to improve lives. For more information about AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T), please visit about.att.com. Investors can learn more at investors.att.com.
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FAQ**
How will AT&T Inc. T's contribution of open telco models impact the implementation of AI in telecommunications, and how does this align with the broader objectives of the Open Telco AI initiative?
What performance benchmarks will the Telco Capability Index use to measure the effectiveness of AI models developed under the Open Telco AI initiative, and how might AT&T Inc. T's models perform against these benchmarks?
In what ways do you anticipate that the collaboration between AMD and AT&T Inc. T will enhance the compute capacity needed for training telco-grade AI models, and what implications does this have for the telecom industry?
How does the Open Telco AI initiative plan to address the current performance gap of AI models in understanding telecom-specific tasks, particularly considering the roll-out of new solutions by AT&T Inc. T?
**MWN-AI FAQ is based on asking OpenAI questions about AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T).
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