Telco to techco: How sovereign AI is powering Indonesia’s digital transformation

Telecom operators worldwide are wrestling with a defining question: remain connectivity providers or evolve into full-stack technology companies in a process dubbed techco transformation.

That transformation is playing out ambitiously in Indonesia, a nation of 17,000 islands where digital access has historically concentrated in major cities. PT Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison Tbk., one of Indonesia’s largest mobile operators, is partnering with applied AI solutions provider Quantiphi Inc. and Google LLC to build a sovereign AI ecosystem capable of reaching every corner of the world’s largest archipelago. However, the architectural and cultural complexity of that mission demands more than technology alone, according to Harshini Infanta (pictured, right), associate practice lead for agentic enterprise intelligence at Quantiphi.

“When we talk about the digital sovereignty of an entire nation, it’s about fundamentally changing what it means for the citizens of that country and how they live their everyday life,” Infanta explained. “What we believed was [that] technology can be transformational only when it becomes invisible.”

Infanta and Vishal Gupta (left), chief techco transformation and procurement officer at Indosat, spoke with theCUBE’s Rebecca Knight at the Phi Moments @ Next event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the techco transformation underway at Indosat, the role of sovereign AI and strategies for scaling agentic systems across a large organization. (* Disclosure below.)

Techco transformation demands sovereign AI and organizational reimagining

The driving force behind Indosat’s techco transformation is a commitment to democratize AI across an archipelago where Bahasa Indonesia — not English — is the primary language. Indosat and fellow Indonesian firm PT GoTo Gojek Tokopedia Tbk have launched Sahabat-AI, an open-source large language model ecosystem that operates across Bahasa Indonesia and several local languages to prevent “digital colonization,” according to Gupta. The company has also become Nvidia Corp.’s sovereign cloud provider in Indonesia.

“Bringing AI into any organization to me is not a transformation — it has to be a re-imagining of the organization,” Gupta said. “We think in a couple of years the number of agent workers will be twice the number of human workers that we have. The whole organizational design is undergoing a change.”

Organizational change management has been as critical as the technology itself. Indosat rolled out quarterly, two-day AI immersion sessions beginning with its top executives and expanding to the next 100 leaders, building trust layer by layer, Gupta explained. For Quantiphi — named a 2026 Google Cloud Partner of the Year in four categories — the engineering philosophy has centered on making adoption come first and technology second, according to Infanta.

“When we drive a high-speed car, you tend to trust the brake systems more than the engine itself,” Infanta said. “We want to ensure that the observability and how we ensure that the agent is doing things that it’s expected to do is very standardized and foolproof before you can actually scale.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Phi Moments @ Next event:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Phi Moments @ Next event. Neither Quantiphi nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE