Gurugram: Xtelify, Bharti Airtel’s digital arm, announced two fresh launches Monday—Airtel Cloud, a telco-grade cloud platform built in India, and AI-powered software platforms for global telecom companies. The new cloud platform could save Indian businesses up to 40 per cent on their cloud spending, according to Airtel.
“It is a very pivotal moment in our history as we take our world-class, home-grown platforms of Airtel Cloud and software solutions to businesses in India and telcos all over the world,” Gopal Vittal, Vice Chairman and Managing Director of Bharti Airtel, said at a conference room in Roseate House, Gurugram.
Vittal kicked off his speech by highlighting Airtel’s success, domestically and internationally, including its current presence in 14 countries across Africa, its investments in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, as well as a total group revenue of $21.5 billion in FY25.
“We put digital at the heart of everything we do,” said Vittal, adding that the strategy was simple: providing the best quality experience to their customers. However, there are challenges in delivering this experience—a problem Airtel has been working on for the past seven years.
The first problem was the siloed category stacks, so changes of an app feature could take months, reducing the velocity of technological progress. The second issue was a disjointed customer journey depending on whether customers accessed Airtel’s services at a retail outlet via an app, or in-person delivery at their home. Vittal highlighted challenges such as the lack of an AI-ready workforce management or AI-ready data infrastructure, among others.
“The cloud runs all our applications. Everything we do at Airtel, whether it is the engineers on the field, our call centres, stores—everything sits in the cloud,” said Vittal, adding that the company’s data engine was the reason they had the highest ARPU (average revenue per user) in the country. “The data engine is our secret sauce and the reason we can serve the same experience across any channel to any customers.”
Xtelify, a 100 percent subsidiary of Airtel, hosts the telecom company’s cloud platform, digital platform, and engineers. The new product, Airtel Cloud, is already tailored to handle 140 crore transactions per minute for the company’s own business in India. According to Vittal, the cloud platform is Gen-AI powered, allowing users to perform functions using simple English queries.
“In a world that is so distributed, and customers can be anywhere, you need to be on the cloud,” said Vittal. “But the challenge is that the cost of moving to the cloud is high and is not regulated. We solved this problem by launching Airtel Cloud.”
The launch of AI-powered software services was aimed at serving global telecom companies across different layers of the value chain. Xtelify, Work, Serve, Data Engine, and IQ would help telecommunication companies remove complexity, improve the customer experience, lower churn, and raise ARPU, according to Airtel.
The company has already signed global partnerships for its AI-powered services. Singapore-based Singtel, for instance, has been using the company’s work platform to empower its field teams. Philippines-based Globe Telecom has been using the Serve platform to improve the customer experience. Airtel Africa is using services across all 14 countries where it operates.
“Being a telecom provider, we are now entering the technology domain and becoming a provider in this space,” said Vittal. “This seminal moment is the launch of Airtel Cloud with AI-powered services.”
(Edited by Madhurita Goswami)