Telecom operators are increasingly building their AI strategies on open models — and the reasons go beyond mere cost.
Open models give telcos the ability to trust, control and customize AI across their most critical workloads — from autonomous networks to customer care.
NVIDIA’s latest State of AI in Telecommunications report reflects this shift, with 89% of respondents reporting that open source models and software are important to their company’s AI strategy.
The NVIDIA Nemotron family of open models provides frontier-level reasoning performance optimized for agentic workflows, as well as speech capabilities for voice applications, with open weights, training data and recipes.
SoftBank Corp. illustrates how an operator can use open models as a basis for developing and continuously advancing its telecom-specific AI capabilities.
“Open models allow SoftBank Corp. to build on the rapid progress of global foundation models while applying the network knowledge and operational expertise we have accumulated over many years,” said Rajeev Koodli, principal fellow of SoftBank Corp. and senior vice president of SB Telecom America. “We are using open foundations extensively, including NVIDIA Nemotron models and others, in developing our SoftBank Large Telecom Model, continuously advancing it for telecom-specific use cases such as network operations, design and overall management.”
In addition, NVIDIA is collaborating with partners to help turn open models into practical building blocks for telecom AI.
NVIDIA announced the 30-billion-parameter Nemotron 3 Large Telco Model (LTM), fine-tuned by AdaptKey on open source telecom datasets to deliver accuracy gains for telecom-specific tasks. This gives operators an open baseline that can understand telecom industry terminology and reason effectively through telecom operations workflows such as network configuration and customer incident triage.
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