Telcos Pressured to Move Beyond 'Trial Phase' with AI

Telecommunications operators in Indonesia are considered to be under pressure. Every day, their networks support more than 347 million mobile connections, spanning business transactions to daily conversations, across over 17,000 islands. At the same time, operators are required to provide a better customer experience while reducing costs. Public consultancy firm Deloitte assesses that agentic artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to be a turning point for the industry, so long as its implementation is carried out with discipline and integrated into daily operations, rather than stalling as trial projects. The 2026 Technology, Media & Telecommunications Predictions report notes that the pressure on operators is no longer purely technical, but also commercial. Deloitte records that up to 77 per cent of consumers worldwide do not feel truly loyal to their service providers. Only 47 per cent have stayed with the same operator for more than five years, whilst the industry churn rate is around 22 per cent per year. On the other hand, 86 per cent of consumers stated they are willing to pay more for a better service experience. Deloitte Southeast Asia’s Technology, Media & Telecommunications Industry Leader for Strategy, Risk & Transactions, Piyush Jain, said that amidst Indonesia’s fast-growing digital economy, the question is no longer whether operators will adopt AI, but whether they are disciplined enough in its application to ease the network burden. In many countries, according to him, too many operators stall at the trial phase—their initiatives look promising when viewed individually but never scale. He assessed that the problem lies not in innovation, but in execution discipline. “Operators moving forward treat AI as a business capability, not a technology experiment: there is clear ownership, measurable results, and firm decisions regarding which use cases are scaled and which are terminated,” said Piyush Jain via a written statement.