The GSMA has officially launched Open Telco AI, a global industry initiative aimed at fast-tracking the development of telecom-grade artificial intelligence through open collaboration. With this move, GSMA brings together telecom operators, infrastructure vendors, AI developers, and academic institutions to close the performance gap between general-purpose AI and telecom-specific needs. At the same time, the organization has introduced a dedicated portal GSMA.com/open-telco-ai offering access to open models, datasets, compute resources, and evaluation tools tailored for the telecom sector.

Although frontier AI models have advanced at a remarkable pace, they still struggle with telecom-centric tasks. For instance, many general-purpose AI systems fail to accurately interpret network data, analyze complex standards documentation, or automate network operations with the precision required by telecom environments. As a result, progress has slowed, with only 16% of telecom Generative AI deployments currently applied to network operations. Clearly, the industry needs a more specialized approach.

AI Authority Trend: AMD and Nutanix Partner to Build Open Full-Stack AI Platform

To address this challenge, Open Telco AI establishes a shared foundation for telecom-grade models, data, compute infrastructure, benchmarks, and a collaborative community. Importantly, the initiative tracks measurable progress through the Telco Capability Index, which evaluates AI model performance across a growing range of telecom-specific tasks.

As founding supporters, AT&T and AMD are playing a pivotal role. AT&T is releasing a family of open telco models developed and trained on publicly available data. These models are designed to remain hardware- and cloud-agnostic, proving that AI can create value regardless of project size or available compute capacity. Meanwhile, AMD is contributing robust GPU-powered compute resources for model training, fine-tuning, inference, and evaluation, leveraging its cloud partner TensorWave and open toolchains.

Additionally, Open Telco AI actively fosters innovation through community programs and industry competitions. Notably, the AI Telco Troubleshooting Challenge attracted over 1,000 registrations, with winners set to be announced 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.”

Similarly, Philip Guido, executive vice president and chief commercial officer, AMD, said: “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. 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.”

AI Authority Trend: SoundHound AI Opens Bengaluru Innovation Hub to Boost Agentic AI Growth

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.”

Furthermore, the Open Telco AI portal supports the co-creation of essential building blocks. These include high-performance open-weight telco models such as RFGPT from Khalifa University and the Large Telco Model (LTM) from AdaptKey AI built on NVIDIA Nemotron. It also provides open datasets contributed by leading universities and technology partners, access to AMD and TensorWave compute resources, a telecom benchmark leaderboard, and collaborative community initiatives.

Overall, Open Telco AI represents a significant industry shift. By combining open innovation, shared infrastructure, and measurable benchmarks, GSMA and its partners are laying the groundwork for intelligent, automated telecom networks worldwide.

AI Authority Trend: UiPath Joins Agentic AI Foundation to Advance Open Enterprise AI Standards

To share your insights, please write to us at info@intentamplify.com