🧠 Food for thought

Implications, context, and why it matters.

Indosat is weaving AI into its business

• At its shareholder meeting, Indosat’s brief mention of AI may have downplayed a wider plan to shift from a telecom operator toward a technology company 1.
• The company is building a sovereign “AI Grid,” which it calls nationwide AI infrastructure using NVIDIA L40s plus H100 graphics processing units (GPUs), chips used to train or run AI systems 2.
• That system backs Sahabat-AI, a 70-billion-parameter AI model built for Bahasa Indonesia plus local languages, including Javanese 1.
• The company tied the plan to business results. Customer churn fell 50%, while average revenue per user rose more than 6% over 90 days 2.

A path for telecom companies facing generic network services

• Indosat’s approach offers one example for telecom operators dealing with connectivity services that are getting harder to tell apart 2.
• By building AI for local languages, Indosat is going after demand that global AI products can miss. The effort also fits Indonesia’s push to keep more control over its digital systems 1.
• The strategy could open income beyond mobile data plans by using Indosat’s infrastructure to offer AI services to businesses 1.
• Indosat already serves more than 20 Indonesian companies with AI services. It is also exploring paid AI features for consumers, said Vikram Sinha, CEO, Indosat 1.