The new initiative is supported by open telecommunications models, including a new family of models from AT&T, computing from AMD and TensorWave, data sets from researchers, and a new portal for industry contribution and collaboration through GSMA.com/open-telco-ai
March 2, 2026Barcelona – GSMA today launched Open Telco AI, a global industry initiative designed to accelerate telecom-grade AI through open collaboration between operators, suppliers, AI developers and academic institutions. The launch features a new portal for open models, data, computing and telecom tools to accelerate the development and evaluation of telecom-focused AI models, accessed through GSMA.com/open-telco-ai.
While cutting-edge AI models have advanced rapidly, they continue to underperform on telecommunications-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 GenAI deployments in telecommunications1 have been applied to network operations.
Open Telco AI addresses this challenge by bringing together industry and academic partners to build the foundations of telco-grade AI models, data, computing, benchmarks, and community. Progress is tracked through the Telecommunications Capability Index, which measures model performance on a growing set of telecommunications-specific tasks.
As founding sponsors of Open Telco AI, AT&T and AMD are making significant contributions. AT&T is launching a family of open telecommunications models built and trained on open, publicly available data to be hardware and cloud agnostic, demonstrating that AI can deliver value in projects of any size and with different levels of computing resources. AMD provides computing power for model training, tuning, inference and evaluation through its GPU platforms, cloud partner TensorWave and open tool chains.
The initiative is also supported by community programs 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 more than 1,000 entries and will announce its winners at MWC26 Barcelona.
Louis Powell, Director of AI Initiatives at GSMA, said: “Today AI models still do not reach the complexity, precision and reliability required by the telecommunications industry. Simply put, AI is not yet talking about telecommunications and operators are often implementing technology that cannot meet the required levels of accuracy, security or efficiency. Establishing clear benchmarks and collaborating across the industry on data sets, models and agent 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.”
“Telecom networks are among the most demanding and regulated environments for AI, and moving from promising demonstrations to telecom-grade performance requires an open foundation for data, workloads and compute.” said Philip Guido, executive vice president and chief commercial officer of AMD. “Through Open Telco AI, with GSMA and AT&T, AMD delivers the AI and enterprise computing needed to efficiently train, tune, and run open telco-grade models from the core to the edge.”
Andy Markus, director of data and artificial intelligence at AT&T, said: “The telecom industry needs AI that understands the realities of networks, not just generic models reused for telecom tasks. Through Open Telco AI, AT&T is helping to build data sets, models and evaluation frameworks that make telcos–Grade AI possible at scale. By contributing our expertise and shaping realistic test environments, we are demonstrating how generative and agent AI can improve the customer experience, reduce operational friction, and ultimately create new value. This collaboration with GSMA is accelerating the industry's path towards intelligent and automated networks.”
Building the open foundations of Telco-level AI
The new portal will support the co-creation of the essential components for telecom-grade AI, including:
- Telecommunications models: High-performance open models designed for telecommunications tasks, from network troubleshooting to standards interpretation, including models of multiple sizes and architectures from AT&T, a radio frequency language model from Khalifa University called RFGPT, and a large telecommunications model (LTM) from AdaptKey AI built on NVIDIA Nemotron.
- Open data: A library of knowledge graphs, embeddings and fine-tuning datasets of text, records and material from selected standards 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.
- Calculate: Access to computing and open toolchain for open model inference and training projects through AMD and TensorWave.
- Reference points: A leaderboard that evaluates 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 foster collaboration, including the AI Telecom Problem Solving Challenge and the Agentic Challenge.
The Open Telco AI initiative is supported by a number of valued contributing partners who have submitted data, models and use cases, including AMD, AT&T, Datumo, Huawei Technologies France and 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 is also supported by valued participating 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.
To learn more and register interest, new partners can visit GSMA.com/open-telco-ai.
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[1] Source: GSMA Intelligence, Telco AI: State of the Market, Q4 2025 (published January 2026)
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