GSMA Launches Open Telco AI to Accelerate Telecom AI
On Monday, March 2, 2026, GSMA launched Open Telco AI, a global initiative aimed at accelerating the development of artificial intelligence tailored to telecommunications through open collaboration between operators, providers, and academic institutions. The program is supported by AT&T, AMD, and TensorWave, along with a host of technological and academic partners.
Current AI Models Underperform in Telecom Tasks
According to a GSMA press release, current frontier AI models continue to underperform in tasks specific to telecommunications. GSMA notes that many generalist models struggle with interpreting network data, understanding technical documentation, or automating network operations with sufficient accuracy. This shortfall explains why only 16% of generative AI deployments in the telecom sector have been applied to network operations, according to a GSMA Intelligence study dated Q4 2025. Open Telco AI aims to bridge this gap by uniting industry and academic players to build the foundations of AI models suited to the sector, including data, computing capabilities, performance metrics, and a community of experts.
New Platform Components and Contributions
The new platform, accessible via GSMA.com/open-telco-ai, is based on several components. AT&T contributes a family of open-source models developed on public data, designed to be hardware and cloud infrastructure agnostic. AMD provides computing capacity through its GPU platforms and its cloud partner TensorWave for training, tuning, inference, and evaluation of models. The program also incorporates data, models, and use cases from contributing partners including Huawei Technologies France, Khalifa University (with the RFGPT model), AdaptKey AI, NVIDIA, Orange, SK Telecom, Swisscom, Vodafone, and about thirty other organizations. A performance metric called the Telco Capability Index measures the performance of models on tasks specific to the sector, while a contest titled AI Telco Troubleshooting Challenge has registered over 1,000 entries with winners to be announced at MWC26 Barcelona.
