Stephen Douglas

Telecommunications operators in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region are beginning to treat artificial intelligence (AI) tokens as billable allowances, much like gigabytes of mobile data or minutes of voice. This session will explore what this emerging “AI token economy” means for telecommunications operators, why the APAC model matters, and how Western operators can adapt the concept for enterprise, sovereign, and regulated AI services.The APAC market shows how operators can move beyond simply carrying AI traffic and begin packaging, rating, bundling, and billing for access to intelligence. By offering AI usage allowances to consumers, households, developers, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and larger enterprises, operators are positioning tokens as a recurring unit of consumption. However, this model does not transfer directly to Western markets, where consumers already access AI through global applications, hyperscalers, and device-native assistants. For many operators, the stronger opportunity is likely to be in business-to-business (B2B) services, including private inference, AI factories, graphics processing unit as a service (GPUaaS), sovereign AI platforms, edge AI, and AI model marketplaces.The presentation will also focus on a critical technical and commercial issue: token visibility. Operators cannot reliably count AI tokens from encrypted network traffic alone; authoritative usage records must come from the AI gateway, model platform, marketplace, or provider settlement layer. This creates a strategic choice: remain a connectivity provider or move into the AI service control plane.Stephen Douglas will also examine why AI-native key performance indicators (KPIs) are becoming essential. Traditional measures such as latency, throughput, and availability remain important, but the AI experience depends on new metrics, including time to first token, inter-token latency, tokens per second, task completion time, cost per token, tokens per watt, and tool-call latency. These metrics will shape assurance, service-level agreement (SLA) management, and monetisation models.Attendees will leave with practical insights into three telecommunications AI monetisation models: connectivity-only services, AI assurance, and AI service brokerage. The core message is clear: APAC is making tokens the new gigabyte; Western operators could follow suit or position tokens as the new cloud consumption unit.