The GSMA Foundry, the innovation arm of the GSMA, has entered a major strategic cooperation agreement with Khalifa University of Science and Technology, one of the UAE’s leading research institutions, to accelerate telecom-focused AI innovation. The partnership was announced on the opening day of MWC Doha, marking a significant step in building sector-specific AI capabilities.
Under the collaboration, Khalifa University will work with GSMA Foundry to develop specialised AI datasets, models and benchmarking frameworks tailored for telecom operations. The goal is to create robust, energy-efficient and safe AI systems that can be deployed across mobile networks worldwide.
In the first phase, the organisations will release key Open Telco assets, including TelecomGPT — a telco-first large language model designed to interpret telecom standards, assist with troubleshooting and support complex network operations. TelecomGPT’s chat interface will be hosted on LightOn, while an Open Telco Knowledge Graph built on 3GPP documentation will be available on Hugging Face.
These tools aim to help operators overcome the limitations of general-purpose AI models, which often struggle with highly technical telecom tasks. Benchmarking by GSMA shows that even advanced LLMs fall short when interpreting specifications or diagnosing network issues, highlighting the need for domain-specific solutions. The collaboration will leverage expertise from Khalifa University’s 6G Research Centre to close this performance gap.
Professor Bayan Sharif, Provost of Khalifa University, said the partnership combines global industry leadership with academic research excellence to develop telecom-grade AI innovations. He noted that the university’s experience in local and international telecom projects positions it well to support GSMA’s ambition of building next-generation AI solutions for the mobile ecosystem.
