Artificial Intelligence is rapidly reshaping telecommunications, shifting operators from traditional connectivity providers to artificial intelligence infrastructure companies operating close to users and regulated data. NVIDIA’s fourth “State of Artificial Intelligence in Telecommunications” survey highlights that 90% said AI is helping increase annual revenue and drive down costs, signaling that the technology is now central to both network strategy and business models. Respondents also reported that 89% said open source models and software are important to their AI strategy, reflecting a broad reliance on community driven tools and frameworks.
Telecommunications operators in the survey, which account for about a quarter of the 1,000 responses, are seeing direct financial benefits from artificial intelligence, with 90% saying AI has had a positive impact on revenue and costs. The top AI use cases cited for return on investment (ROI) were AI for autonomous networks (50%), followed by improved customer service (41%) and internal process optimization (33%). This financial momentum is translating into higher budgets, as 89% of respondents said their AI budget will increase in the next 12 months, up from 65% in last year’s survey, and 35% said their budgets would increase more than 10% from this year.
Network automation has overtaken customer experience as the leading investment priority, as operators push toward self managing, artificial intelligence native networks that can self configure, self heal and self optimize with minimal human input. Eighty-eight percent of organizations report being between levels 1-3 of autonomy, and the use of generative AI and agentic AI is expected to accelerate the shift to level 5 autonomous networks. A surge in edge computing investment is bringing artificial intelligence inferencing closer to users and supporting AI-native RAN and 6G, with 77% of respondents anticipating a much faster time to deployment of this new AI-native wireless network architecture. At the same time, 60% said their organization is using or assessing generative AI, up from 49% in 2024, and nearly every respondent said AI is boosting employee productivity, with 26% citing major to significant improvements to their ability to complete more tasks with higher quality in less time. Overall, 65% of telecom operators said network automation is being driven by AI, 77% said they expect to see AI-native networks launch before the deployment of 6G, and 89% of telcos plan to boost AI spending in 2026, up from 65% a year ago.
