- AI presents opportunity for telcos to regain leadership lost to AWS and Netflix, said Renen Hallak, founder and CEO of VAST Data
- European telcos are already stepping up
- And VAST sees itself as a vital partner in telcos' new role (no surprise there!)
VAST FORWARD 2026, Salt Lake City — AI presents opportunity for telcos to regain relevance in a world where they've lost value, said Renen Hallak, founder and CEO of VAST Data.
"I think telcos have been irrelevant for a long time," Hallak said in a Q&A for journalists and industry analysts kicking off the company's customer conference this week. "Basically, they became a pipe and let everybody on top of them own the content and have the actual value."
Telcos missed the opportunity to become cloud and content providers, but instead Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Netflix seized those opportunities, he said.
However, AI is a new opportunity, which telcos are well-positioned to grasp. "Everything's changing and a new stack is getting built," Hallak said. AI requires new means of transferring information, inferring at the edge and telcos have points of presence around the world to deliver on those opportunities. "And that's how you build the nervous system of this new giant brain that's getting built," he said.
"Will they do it? I don't know," Hallak said. "We're seeing the neoclouds start to step into that place." Telcos are partnering to seize these opportunities. "I don't know how this pans out, but I think this is the telcos' opportunity to take," he said.
Europe steps up
European telcos are taking advantage of AI opportunities, VAST co-founder Jeff Denworth said. These companies are government-funded and almost run by their nation-states and those governments are earmarking billions of dollars for AI. John Mao, VAST VP global technology alliances, added that telcos are becoming the default sovereign cloud providers for AI.
What's VAST's role? "We're here to help everybody focus on what they know and what they're good at. And we're here to make it simple," Hallak said. VAST is the provider of the operating system for AI — just as the phone operating system permits myriad mobile applications, the AI operating system permits chat and new AI apps. "That's where we come in," he said.
For example, telcos have multi-cloud strategies, where they are building sovereign AI clouds within the borders of each country and have to be compliant with local regulations, said Jonsi Stefansson, VAST GM of Cloud Solutions. The Vast PolicyEngine, introduced this week, can help telcos — and enterprises — deliver compliant, secure and trustworthy AI by ensuring AI follows organizations' policies. "So I think we are going to play a huge role if they want to step up," Stefansson said.
Fierce's take
Fierce kicked off the discussion of telco AI during the VAST executive Q&A by asking what VAST sees as the telco role for AI. We were pleasantly shocked by the brashness of Hallak's response.
However, while Hallak's statement was startlingly direct, he made points that have been discussed in the context of telco AI for a while. Telcos appeared well-positioned to cash in on the cloud, streaming video and audio and also app stores and social media, but they failed to do so for regulatory and cultural reasons.
Leading telcos are seizing the opportunity to take leadership in AI and prevent history from repeating itself. That's the subject of our recent report: Risk, reward and revenue: Defining the telco role in the AI economy In a survey of 500 telco leaders worldwide, as well as a dozen in-depth interviews, we learned that telcos are split on whether to provide simple connectivity, or evolve into full-service AI players.