Telco results show signs of AI service growth

Are communications service providers’ investments in AI starting to translate into higher revenues? Certainly, the latest round of quarterly results show a small but growing number of CSPs accrediting financial growth to their AI strategies.

TELUS, Softbank Corp, and IOH all pointed to how investments in AI services and AI-driven operational efficiency are contributing to the bottom line during this month’s reporting on results for the quarter ended 31 March 2026.

And although Deutsche Telekom was among the many operators that have yet to detail AI’s impact on its financial performance it intends to do so during a capital markets day to be held 5 October 2026, according to Timotheus Höttges, CEO Deutsche Telekom, speaking during the company’s Q1 2026 earnings call.

“My number one priority in the company is implementing AI and working in AI,” said Timotheus Höttges, CEO, Deutsche Telekom.

When it comes to figures, TELUS stood out with its report of 22% revenue growth from AI-enabling capabilities in the first quarter of 2026. Referring to the “momentum of our AI-driven strategy”, the company aims to increase revenue from AI capabilities from $800 million in 2025 to around $2 billion in 2028 across both TELUS Digital and TELUS Business Solutions.

Growth in sovereign services

One of TELUS’ successes, highlighted in its earnings call, was its Sovereign AI Factory, which it said sold out of compute capacity within months of launching.

Sovereign AI has also been a driver in Indonesia. IOH’s AI compute platform called AI Neocloud, delivered revenues of $16 million in the first quarter of 2026, compared to $28 million for the whole of 2025. The company now expects AI Neocloud meet revenue targets of $60m for 2026.

SoftBank also made clear its growth ambitions for its AI computing infrastructure and AI data centers, which provide GPU cloud and sovereign cloud services, during its quarterly results announcement.

The Japanese service provider stated the “enterprise segment will act as a growth driver, with Cloud & AI businesses positioned as new areas of focus to help double segment profit by FY2030”. Softbank’s initiatives include collaboration with Oracle to provide scalable sovereign cloud and AI services to organizations in Japan.

The story is similar in Germany, according to Höttges.

“We see that many enterprises, the public sector, want the benefit of AI,” said Höttges. But they want it with a clear requirent on data sovereignty, compliance, security, operational control, he explained, adding “we're seriously investing into this one.“

Beyond the AI factory

At the same time, telcos are eyeing service opportunities beyond AI computing infrastructure.

Softbank Corp has multiple B2B irons in the fire with which it hopes to drive growth in the mature Japanese market.

Its parent company, Softbank Group, is one of the largest external investors in OpenAI. Softbank Corp intends to offer Japanese enterprises a package to implement and integrate OpenAI's latest products, under the name “Crystal intelligence”. Other initiatives include “Sarashina API,” a service that enables enterprise customers to connect systems and applications to its Japanese language large language model (LLM) “Sarashina mini.”

IOH meanwhile is eyeing both consumer and enterprise opportunities.

“We used to be in the connectivity business for decades. Now we have the opportunity to democratise intelligence and also monetise that,” according to Vikram Sinha, CEO, IOH, on the company’s earnings call, as reported by Telecom TV. Early services include integrated bundles of data and Google Gemini. “Our partnership with Gemini Pro has given some good early numbers, and that will help us on ARPU growth in the coming quarters. And there are more AI products in the pipeline, which gives us a lot of confidence that the ARPU growth journey will continue.”

In addition to Gemini Pro, IOH has launched Sahabat-AI. A multi-model and multi-modal AI platform distributed via the App Store and Play Store, it enables Indonesian consumers and businesses to use AI in their own language.

Operational efficiency

At the same time IOH is using AI to increase operational efficiency and new service delivery.

IOH reported a 12% year-on-year (YoY) increase in revenues for the quarter of 31st March 2026, which, at IDR 15.2 trillion, it said were the highest in its history.

IOH’s core mobile business was key to growth, delivering a 15% increase in blended ARPU to reach IDR 45,000 [$2.58] which the company attributed to its AI hyper personalization strategy. This is in part a back-end story of optimizing the use of data. Data traffic, meanwhile, grew by 25.1% year-on-year[JT1] .

TELUS too highlighted the internal role of AI in delivering efficiencies while improving service.

“Internally in the B to B side, we are working with the Telus digital team around our own AI and agentic implementations that are going to really help with an improved customer experience, as well as margin expansion.”