According to a recent IBM Institute of Business Value (IBV) 2025 report, up to 56% of Telecommunications Companies (TELCO) CEOs surveyed around the world say they encourage organizations to hire them faster than some people feel comfortable.
“While 58% of CEOs surveyed from the telco sector say that organizations are actively hiring AI agents today to improve productivity, 63% of CEOs say that organizations are adopting technology faster than people can adapt.
He shared these and other findings from the IBV report in a presentation in the recently held “Telco Future with AI” virtual media roundtable hosted by IBM and joined by BusinessToday.
Featuring insightful opening remarks from Catherine Lian, general manager and technology leader at IBM ASEAN (PIC’s heart) we also saw panel discussions with panelists representing ASEAN TELCOS, including Singapore’s Tankit Yong and Far Left. Dr. Komang Budi Aryasa, EVP Digital Business and Technology (Far Right) at Telkom Indonesia; and Low Chia Sen, Time Cloud CTO at Time Dotcom, Malaysia.
In her opening remarks, Lean said that IBM is working to play its role in driving the ASEAN region’s technological and digital transformation journey. IBV’s research highlights the fact that AI is revolutionizing industry across the board, highlighting that telecom operators or telecom service providers (CSPs) stand at an important intersection of transformation and opportunity.
“In our opinion, they are moving beyond automation to decision-making, network optimization, proactive customer care, manage supply chain disruptions and leverage the possibilities of 5G. This is very clear across the region. This research emphasizes that digital connectors are in their own position as CSP as a digital connector is beyond AI-ceos besions beyond AI-driven opportunities. Increased costs and operational efficiency continues to be important, and CSPs are embracing digital transformation and challenging AI and public-private partnerships, including enabling smarter cities, creating interactive media platforms, and content services.”
Another important insight from the research pointed out by Lian was that 58% of global Telco CEOs believe their relative competitiveness depends on those with the most advanced and aggressive adoption of generating AI. “AI agents autonomously optimize operations, proactively solve challenges, provide personalized experiences, unlock unprecedented productivity and innovation across all industries.”
During his presentation, Cheung said he wanted to leverage generated AI and AI to create products and services that allow Telco CEOs to create innovative and attract additional clients.
“I think, as (Lian) pointed out, AI adoption is at a crossroads where it can drive productivity and profitability significantly, but I think Telcos can be at a crossroads because it’s driving new revenue streams and not creating new business models.
All three panelists have partnered with IBM and other ecosystem partners to build AI capabilities. Starhub’s Telco Core is converted to a digital core and leverages Cloud Infinity, a hybrid multi-cloud architecture, to build network services for 5G, optical, broadband, and even enterprise network products.
“We invest in management tools and partner with IBM in the area of automation management using Ansible (with IBM Power Servers). Most importantly, service guarantees are collected from IBM into a data platform called Watsonx to enable network observability,” says Starhub’s Tan.
Indonesia’s Telco Telkom has partnered with IBM to provide sovereign AI capabilities to Indonesia.
“Partnerships are very strategic from our perspective as they cannot take on AI initiatives on their own. IBM is very familiar and very knowledgeable about AI platforms. We adopted the platform to develop both internal and external use cases. IBM’s enterprise grade AI development studio is “AI Empowers Indonesia.”
Meanwhile, in Malaysia, Time Dotcom is implementing IBM Cloud Pak for network automation built on Red Hat OpenShift to make it more efficient and flexible in a wide range of environments and speed up delivery of new digital services.
“We already have a very robust infrastructure to deliver to the market here. But intermediate companies are still far behind in terms of digitalization, using cloud-native facilities to support and grow their businesses. Like IBM, we provide vertically-centric solutions to intermediate companies.” Low States.
When asked whether AI use would be more beneficial in the front or back office of carriers, the panelists all agreed that AI has its use in both scenarios.
“We co-create with our enterprise clients. We need to make data-driven decisions. This is not possible without data. So, after using clean data, it helps users make faster decisions and process multiple data points. Being piloted in collaboration with AI.
“When you’re dealing with telephone company operations, there are a lot of logs, whether it’s a network operation log or a security log that humans can’t thoroughly inspect. So, you need an AI engine to support your operations team’s analysis, so you can make the right decisions to take the actions you take to respond to the situation. Especially if your customer is concerned about the privacy of your data, you need to deal with that part.
Dr. Komang adds that when Telkom first considered whether it had to build AI for internal or external use cases, the company had to calculate what would give more value to the company. “At this point, we need to build AI to focus on improving our back-end systems before addressing external customer needs and craft solutions. This is a choice based on the reality of scarce resources from a person and time perspective.”
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