From Bytes to Tokens: How Telcos Can Own the AI Value Chain
- Telecom Infra Project
- 8 hours ago
- 2 min read
What does it mean for telcos to lead in the age of AI, and what would it take to get there?
In this episode of The Signal Boost, TIP’s Chief Commercial Officer Vishal Mathur sat down with Arijit Sengupta, CEO of Aible and co-creator/co-teacher of the first AI course in the Harvard Business School MBA program, to explore that question. Drawing on decades of AI work across more than 1,000 projects and real-world predictive models, Arijit argues that telcos are uniquely positioned to serve as the coordination layer for AI, connecting intelligence across the core and the edge. The opportunity is real, but so is the urgency.
The shift from bytes to tokens
The conversation opens with a reframe of what telcos actually move. It’s not just data; it’s increasingly AI workloads, agent-to-agent communications, and inference traffic. That shift, from transporting bytes to enabling tokens, changes where value is created in the stack.
Long-running agents and the “claw”
A central theme of the episode is the emergence of long-running agents, or “claws.” Unlike single-turn AI queries, these agents persist, coordinate, and operate across time and systems. Aible announced SafeClaw around NVIDIA GTC 2026, with activations across partner booths and sessions including Dell Technologies, HPE, Nebius, Cisco, Lenovo, Lanner Electronics, and TD SYNNEX.
As Arijit explains, the infrastructure connecting agents, the lines between the nodes rather than the nodes themselves, is where telcos have a natural and significant advantage.
Real-world context
Arijit draws on examples from Cisco, CVS Health, Baptist Health, IKEA, and the State of Nebraska to show how agentic AI is moving into practical enterprise use cases. He also shares the story of a Nebraska hackathon where 36 non-technical users built 222 working agents in 90 minutes, a snapshot of how quickly agentic AI is moving from concept to practice.
The broader question
Past platform shifts have shown that building foundational infrastructure doesn’t automatically translate into capturing value. Arijit’s argument is that telcos have an opportunity, and a limited window, to be more than the conduit for agentic AI and to define what their role in that ecosystem looks like.
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