90: AI in Telecom and Mobile Networks with Chetan Sharma

About this episode

Summary:

Anastassia sits down with Chetan Sharma, one of the most respected strategists in global wireless.

For 25 years, Chetan has been an independent strategist advising CEOs and CTOs of the world’s leading wireless companies, e.g., NTT DoCoMo, AT&T Wireless, China Mobile, Qualcomm, Samsung, and Sprint, and he has served on the advisory boards of Ericsson, Telefónica, Kymeta, NextNav, and numerous startups. He wrote Mobile Advertising: Supercharge Your Brand in the Exploding Wireless Market and Wireless Broadband: Conflict and Convergence — with titles adopted in corporate training programs and university courses at NYU, Stanford, and the University of Tokyo. He is the editor of the Mobile Future Forward book series.

Key Takeaways:

Every wireless wave follows the same curve. Voice, messaging, and data each peaked once penetration hit 80–90%, then revenue declined. Operators must invest in the “fourth wave” — platforms, applications, and enterprise services — before the data curve turns down.

China proved the fourth-wave thesis. By transforming from pure comms players into IT players, Chinese operators generated close to $100 billion in enterprise and platform services over five years — a scale the rest of the world hasn’t matched.

AI’s home in the network is the platform layer. Intelligence will live everywhere — in the RAN (Radio Access Network), at the edge, on devices — but the platform layer orchestrates it all: energy, RAN management, compute, and the “intelligence traffic” of tokens across billions of nodes.

Compute and comms are finally converging, enabling more sophisticated algorithms for spectral efficiency and network manageability.

AI already delivers hard savings. Intelligent on/off orchestration of cell-site carriers alone can yield 40–60% energy savings, and AI-driven operations can resolve issues before humans even see the ticket.

Security is a multi-level battle. AI lets attackers automate vulnerability hunting across operator, enterprise, and national-security layers — including legacy systems.

Talent is strategy. Operators outsourced R&D and product development for decades; AI is the chance to bring it back in-house.

New ventures need freedom to run. AT&T’s connected-devices unit succeeded because it operated as an independent entity with full support from the top.

Europe is falling behind. A steep patent decline since ~2008–09, a weak LTE and 5G cycle, and long lags between intention, budget, and execution — compounded by AI Act–driven startup exits — put the EU at risk of missing the AI cycle too.

The best telco CEOs are storytellers and portfolio managers.

Hold multiple truths at once. Borrowing from the Buddhist Catuṣkoṭi: AI is simultaneously a bubble, transformative, and disruptive. Don’t wed yourself to one truth — let the situation guide you.

Chapters:

03:13 From 1G fraud detection with neural networks to 25 years of strategy consulting

06:09 The waves of wireless: voice, messaging, data and beyond

12:16 Where AI lives in the network stack — and the new security battlefield

17:01 AI-run networks: What does it mean?

21:10 Disaggregating the RAN, exposing network intelligence, and reinventing the operator

31:17 CAPEX, economics of compute, sovereign AI and why Europe is behind

39:45 What makes a great telco CEO

Hyperlinks:

Chetan Sharma Consulting

Chetan Sharma LinkedIn

Chetan Sharma X (Twitter)

Mobile Future Forward (executive summit & book series)

https://www.mobilefutureforward.com

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