The Strategic Role of Telecom Providers Across the AI Value Chain 2026

2Three strategic pathways for CSPs Telecom providers can pursue distinct pathways to protect core connectivity, enable AI services and support sovereign AI ecosystems. As a starting point, this paper organizes the growth opportunities for CSPs along three strategic pathways, each reflecting a distinct vector of value creation in the emerging AI economy. The first pathway is the modern telco, focused on strengthening and monetizing the network foundation for AI workloads. The second, the AI techco, reflects the move into AI-ready infrastructure and services that operate alongside connectivity. The third, national sovereign champion, centres on enabling compliant, trusted and sovereign AI ecosystems that align with rising geopolitical, regulatory and national security priorities. Pathways are not all equally achievable and are heavily dependent on the AI maturity level (internal capabilities, external partnerships) and market context (regulatory environment and overall market readiness). Both are discussed later in the paper. Pathway 1: Modern telco As AI adoption accelerates, it creates pressure to modernize infrastructure and unlocks an opportunity to monetize performance through value-based services. At the same time, protecting interoperability is critical; AI infrastructure must remain vendor-agnostic and standardized, not locked into a few dominant hyperscale platforms. The modern telco is emerging as an AI-enhanced connectivity provider delivering secure, predictable, high-performance networks. By using AI to improve operations and customer experience and enable differentiated network performance, telcos can protect their core connectivity business while boosting efficiency and productivity. Pathway 2: AI techco AI’s expansion is creating sustained demand for secured compute, capacity, storage and model management platforms closer to the user. As AI services increasingly support applications with real-time requirements – such as robotics, autonomous systems and physical AI – value creation depends on network infrastructure capable of delivering low latency, predictable performance and quality-of-experience (QoE) guarantees. The AI techco can be an end-to-end connected capacity player with AI services delivered on top of hyperscale platforms, becoming a trusted orchestrator for enterprises and consumers. The services portfolio of the AI techco will evolve from current core connectivity services towards AI- powered managed services orchestrated and delivered in an individualized, on-demand way at guaranteed quality-of-service (QoS) (on top of secure and autonomous networks enabled by AI). Through the AI techco pathway, operators can outgrow their reliance on subscriber growth and loyalty beyond licensed services. 2.1 Overview of the three strategic pathways The Strategic Role of Telecom Providers across the AI Value Chain 8