A big question telecoms operators face around the world today is how best to integrate AI into their networks. It is not about whether they will do this, but how efficiently and deeply they will manage it and incorporate AI into their practices.

Another question is how operators will ensure that AI is built to adapt to local realities and needs in different countries. While it is difficult to forecast the exact path ahead, insight is increasingly emerging from major operators on some of the steps they might take to meet these needs.

One of these is Indonesia’s Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison. At a round table event at this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, CEO Vikram Sinha discussed how the operator is undergoing a transformation from a traditional telco into an AI-driven technology company.

He reiterated Indosat’s belief that pushing for digital sovereignty rather than relying on foreign-built AI models is not optional, but a technological imperative for a country seeking to shape the future and empower its own citizens.

The company believes that this can also be a central prong in fast-tracking the country’s ‘Golden Indonesia’ strategy, which foresees the country becoming a high-income nation by 2045 and the world’s fourth-largest economy, enhancing productivity and driving up GDP through digital transformation.

The ‘great equaliser’

Setting the scene, Sinha cited how Indosat has come a long way towards its vision in just the past four years, since it merged with Hutchison 3 Indonesia and since Sinha took the reins at the company. Creating a huge operator, with around 100 million mobile subscribers today, the company’s AI strategy represents an interesting case study in a vast country with many remote areas and a population of around 290 million.

Sinha outlined how Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison’s goal is to become ‘AI-native’, making the technology a core element of the operator’s activities by “embedding AI in everything we do”. Forming part of this is Indosat’s belief that the technology should be for everyone and that it can help democratise intelligence. “We very strongly believe that AI is a great equaliser,” said Sinha.

A key part of Indosat’s journey is the development of app-based AI platform Sahabat-AI, which the company initially unveiled in November 2024 and has now officially launched in partnership with the government’s Ministry of Communication and Digital Affairs. The platform provides multi-model and multi-modal capabilities, allowing users to move easily from text to images and video, conduct smart searches, create content and receive coding assistance.

With an ethos that Sinha describes as “made in Indonesia for Indonesians” and aimed at strengthening the country’s digital sovereignty, the service is built as a digital companion to be open to everyone from students and creators to businesses and public institutions without its use requiring a technical background. “Our focus is on how this becomes a sovereign play for Indonesia,” said Sinha.

Local focus

To meet local needs and help overcome the digital divide, Sahabat-AI has been created with the use of an open-source large language model to support Indonesia’s multiple regional languages.

It also aligns with the country’s cultural values, social norms and ethical standards, bringing together research institutes, universities, government agencies and other partners in an open ecosystem to unlock new paths for socioeconomic growth and innovation, while helping to preserve local cultures and dialects amid the global surge in AI development.

At the round table, Sinha cited uses such as the likes of healthcare, whereby Sahabat-AI can act as a co-pilot for medical staff in communication and patient administration. He noted challenges with the shortage of doctors and nurses in Indonesia that the platform can help to overcome, while the platform can aid health in remote areas as well.

In addition, it can aid in fields such as education, acting as a personal tutor and lesson planner for teachers and students, and in sustainable development. Future uses include applications in agentic AI and citizen services.

“We want to build something that solves real problems, and that helps with linguistics and culture,” said Sinha. “We also want to make sure that citizen services are as accessible to people as possible.”

‘North Star’

Sahabat-AI is one part of Indosat’s wider drive to integrate AI throughout its operations, enhancing Indonesia’s position to put itself at the forefront of the technology’s growth.

The company had earlier outlined this so-called “AI North Star” mission at its Capital Markets Day in 2024, citing three main pillars for empowering Indonesia through the technology and becoming a full-stack sovereign AI platform. These comprised becoming an AI-native telco, an AI tech co and an AI ‘nation shaper’.

As part of the drive to shape this mission, Sinha referred at the round table to the AI-RAN Research Center that Indosat established last year in Surabaya on the island of Java in collaboration with Nokia and NVIDIA.

The research centre, which the company describes as a “smart connectivity innovation hub”, is designed to develop AI-powered radio-access networks – housing research into Sahabat-AI as one of its projects, alongside work on physical and visual AI.

The associated AI-RAN infrastructure allows high-performance software-defined RAN and AI applications on the same infrastructure and connects to Indosat’s existing AI Factory, creating a distributed platform to bring AI closer to end users as workloads shift to the edge.

Through the research centre, Indosat and its partners are also seeking to set up an ‘AI Grid’, which will connect the AI Factory with new AI-RAN hubs across Indonesia that can host applications in any location from data centres to the distributed 5G network.

Training for the future

Furthermore, the research centre will see a new generation of AI and telecoms specialists being trained and upskilled through hands-on learning, mentorship and real-world experimentation, boosting knowledge transfer and innovation, and creating a workforce geared towards the future of advanced communications.

Indosat sees this focus on people as one of the key requirements for the country to develop AI into the future, with Sinha citing the need to invest in human resources to unlock the full potential of the technology. At the end of the day, all the developments in AI are “meaningless” if the company is not able to turn them into real value for Indonesia’s people, he said.

In a similar vein, Sinha emphasised the importance of fostering close partnerships to advance AI, which have been central to Indosat’s AI journey to date. These include the link-up with NVIDIA to power distributed AI infrastructure using its GPUs and Nokia on advanced RAN technologies.

In addition, the company has established a long-term partnership with Google Cloud to aid AI integration and a strategic collaboration with Ericsson and Google to consolidate its Business Support System onto a single cloud-based platform, helping accelerate AI adoption at scale.

Cross-sector push

Combining these partnerships with the cross-sector collaboration with government and research institutions, and businesses in multiple fields, it is clear that Indosat views the development of AI as a whole-society, ecosystem-focused endeavour. “I think one of the biggest risks any company can have is not having strong partnerships based on the right principles,” said Sinha. “We want to cultivate those partnerships.”

He added that Indonesia has favourable conditions when it comes to land, water and power, an abundance of which are essential prerequisites for AI to succeed in the world of today.

Data centre capacity in the country is also growing to support the surge in demand, with forecasts that it will rise from 0.3GW in 2024 to over 1GW by 2030 – by when AI workloads will account for almost a fifth of that capacity. However, investment in resources to accelerate this and to develop transformative use cases is still needed.

If that can be achieved, it may lay the ground for Indonesia to maximise its impact in ensuring AI sovereignty and AI for all. “We are in a place where we have started to make a real difference,” said Sinha.