Emmanuel Durou, Deloitte’s Technology, Media & Telecoms Leader for the Middle East
Doha, Qatar: As artificial intelligence (AI) advances from experimental technology to enterprise backbone, the global telecom industry is positioning itself at the forefront of its adoption.
At the Mobile World Congress (MWC Doha) 2025, industry leaders highlighted how AI, especially agentic and sovereign AI models, is rapidly becoming the next frontier for telecom growth, reshaping both revenue opportunities in the B2B market and the internal operations of operators themselves.
“So, number one, for sure, it’s a great opportunity for the region to host MWC and to see the evolution of the telco industry towards a technology-centred industry,” Emmanuel Durou, Deloitte’s Technology, Media & Telecoms Leader for the Middle East, told The Peninsula.
He credited MWC and its host GSMA for helping operators shift “from the communication service provider towards value-added services, towards new technology offerings, including cloud, and more and more AI and agentic-AI driven.”
Durou outlined two major areas of disruption and opportunity for operators, one in the market and one within their own organisations. On the external opportunity side, he said telcos are now well-positioned to capitalise on the commercial potential of AI, particularly in B2B markets. “We believe that it’s time for the telcos to get on the revenue-generating opportunity of AI,” he said. In the Middle East, operators have a strategic advantage in becoming “the key leading players, supporting the B2B space with sovereign AI, thanks to their infrastructure, trusted brands, and reputation for secure services.”
The second major area of opportunity lies inside the telcos themselves. Durou said agentic AI and autonomous systems will redefine how telecom companies operate. “There’s a significant opportunity for telcos to become much leaner organisations,” he said, pointing to concrete use cases across field-force automation, supply-chain efficiency, and network operations. A growing component of this shift, he noted, is the integration of physical AI, including drones and autonomous machines, to modernise field operations and automate network management.
Looking at the broader AI journey, Durou said the region has already moved past early adoption. “We have seen a lot of early adopters in Gen-AI. Now we’re moving towards agentic AI, and eventually we’ll move to multi-agent systems,” he said.
Cloud-native AI platforms are essential for rapid deployment, he said, but the real challenge is scaling responsibly. Durou emphasised Deloitte’s “scaling safe” framework, which ensures organisations adopt AI with strong governance and guardrails. “First, you start with a human in the loop and then progressively you make sure that you deploy agentic AI at scale in the organisation.”
Durou also elucidated that operators cannot afford to sit out this technological shift. “For us, telcos do not have the choice but to embark on the AI journey,” he said. “Given the history of telcos, and for telcos to avoid being only dumb pipes, it is very important that they embark on the agentic AI bandwagon.”
