Alliances forged by these telcos draw a line over the way telcos have been doing business as connectivity targets. Instead, they are moving further up the value chain and turning themselves into digital service solutions co-creators. Which includes generating AI fully integrated into the client’s businesses and offering appliance-less scaled AI models. Once was a business model where telcos and hyperscalers were polarized competitors is swiftly turning into a different business model where suppliers and service customers cooperate.
While telcos furnish the physical provisions such as fibre, passive and active customers as well as public locations, the hyperscalers have strong IA and vast infrastructure. This approach enhances not only the operations, like Vodafone’s AI agent cutting down the call recordings longer than 1 minute, but it also enables businesses to launch entirely new sources of revenue -starting with GPU-as-a-service in autonomous cars to super-apps in untapped emerging markets that span e-commerce, fintech, and content aggregation. By adopting these hyperscalers, the telcos become more flexible, affordable, and go up in the value chain. This move fits them not only to a better competitive position between them, but also against great tech companies they Merged with.
