DTW Ignite: China Mobile, Jio and T-Mobile USA spell out AI-native network strategy

Not many telcos trumpet their success in delivering 5G services at scale. Executives from three that do - China Mobile, Jio, T-Mobile – took to the stage during the opening session of DTW Ignite 2025 to detail how they will use AI to build on 5G infrastructure and shape the networks and customer experiences of the future.

For Ulf Ewaldsson, president, technology, T-Mobile, USA, there is a move away from managing networks and towards managing personalized customer experience.

“Carriers used to manage networks,” said Ewaldsson. “Now we must manage intent, thanks to the ingredients of AI to provide the best possible customer experience at any given moment.”

Not all the pieces are in place today for true intent-based networking: Ewaldsson indicates 2030 as the time when “networks will no longer wait for prompts” to deliver experiences that match individual user requirements.

China Mobile, Jio and T-Mobile USA, which all have the relative luxury of operating in large national markets, are investing in AI-native networks. (T-Mobile USA has the smallest customer base of the three with 131 million subscribers.)

And unlike some CSPs in smaller markets, China Mobile, which has just over one billion mobile users, and T-Mobile are starting to talk about 6G. Ewaldsson, for example, envisages 6G arriving at the end of the decade and supporting “maybe 100 times more data usage … lower than a millisecond latency, and perhaps 500 billion connected devices globally.”

“We're making ... the network aware about what's going on every device … to evolve our slicing advantage into becoming the next generation network. And 6G networks will superpower this thing,” he said.

For Li Huidi, Executive Vice President, China Mobile “AI enhances network services as a key step on the path to 6G.”

Jio did not mention 6G by name, but it is also using AI to alter the networks and operations of the future.

“AI is our new UI. And APIs are our new KPIs,” said Anish Shah, President, Chief Operating Officer, Jio, which serves around half a billion customers in India. “We are trying to ensure that we are not just bringing AI as it is, but we are actually re-architecting our entire real time decision systems,” he added.

“We are doing it in … our HR systems, in our finance systems, in our IT systems,” explained Shah. “And then, of course, we are doing it for the network. We're doing it for business operations, and then customer service as well. So, it is being plugged into each and every function.”

Monetizing AI services

China Mobile’s Huidi provided detail on how AI-native approaches to networking are unfolding on the ground and contributing to new revenues as China Mobile simultaneously invests in hyperscale computing power.

“AI is also upgrading how we deliver computing power,” said Huidi. “As the workload shifts from bits to tokens, the architecture of cloud services is evolving from cloud computing to cloud AI computing.”

China Mobile operates more than one million servers for general computing tasks, and its intelligent computing power exceeds 43 eflops “meaning we can schedule about 1/6 of China's available computing power,” according to Huidi. (For an idea of what this means in practice, Indiana University states that “to match what an exaflop computer can do in just one second, you’d have to perform one calculation every second for 31,688,765,000 years.”)

Between January and May this year, the company’s intelligent computing services generated as much revenue as during the whole of 2024 to reach 2.1 billion Chinese yuan. “So basically, double the speed, more than double the revenue growth for AI,” said Huidi.

The company is also using Agentic AI to up its 5G private network game.

China Mobile now operates over 48,000 5G private network projects, according to Huidi. “In the past, enterprises had to wait for a week for a complete solution. An agentic AI pre-sales agent can now integrate customer intent network resources and capabilities to deliver a tailored solution design “in just minutes and a complete budget offering within 30 minutes,” he said.  Again, this is feeding revenue growth.

“This agent has supported over 300 projects and our 5G private network revenue reached 8.7 billion yuan, up 61% year on year,” said Huidi, adding 5G private network revenue is currently growing by 70%.

At the same time, China Mobile is reporting cost savings from network automation. The company has achieved AN level four in 13 of TM Forum’s high value AN scenarios, which include service provisioning and network change monitoring.

This has helped contribute to annual energy savings of around 12% or 7.4 billion kilowatt per hour, according to Huidi, and OpEx savings in excess of 7 billion yuan.