Indonesia's telecom industry is going through one of its more interesting shifts in years. For a long time, operators built their business around a single product: connectivity. Sell more data, more minutes, more coverage, and revenue would follow on its own. That formula is running out of room, and companies like Telkom Indonesia and XLSMART are now treating AI monetization as the next real driver of income. The goal is no longer just to make networks smarter or trim costs. It is to turn artificial intelligence into a genuine revenue engine, one that touches everything from everyday mobile subscribers to large enterprise clients.

From Cost Cutting to a Genuine Revenue Strategy

For years, AI in telecom was mostly a back office story. Operators used it to automate networks, detect fraud, and cut operational spending. That picture is changing fast, and the numbers back it up. A GSMA report presented at MWC Shanghai 2026 found a sharp shift in how telecom companies frame their AI projects. In the second quarter of 2025, 84 percent of global telecom AI initiatives were still built around efficiency, with only 16 percent aimed at revenue. By the first quarter of 2026, that balance had moved considerably, with 62 percent focused on efficiency and 38 percent now aimed squarely at revenue generation.

The pattern is even more pronounced in Asia Pacific and China, where 45 percent of telecom companies already say they use AI to drive revenue, while the remaining 55 percent still lean toward cost savings. Put together, these figures suggest that AI monetization is no longer a side experiment. It has become a strategic priority that boards and executives are actively tracking, and Indonesian operators are clearly paying attention to where the rest of the region is heading.

Why B2C Customers Are Feeling the Difference

On the consumer side, the shift shows up in small, practical ways rather than sweeping changes. Andrijanto Muljono, Director and Chief Enterprise Strategic Relationship Officer at XLSMART Telecom Sejahtera, explains that AI in the retail or B2C segment is being used to improve customer experience, speed up complaint resolution, and support retention by surfacing product offers that are more relevant to each individual customer's habits and needs. For this segment, he notes that a simple user experience combined with real personalization is what actually makes AI monetization work, rather than flashy features that customers never end up using.

Telkom Indonesia shares a similar philosophy. Andri Herawan Sasoko, VP of Corporate Communication at Telkom, says that technology has to feel genuinely helpful: faster, easier, safer, and useful for everyone, every household, and every business activity. In practice, Telkom is directing its AI efforts in the B2C segment toward digital experiences that feel more personal and relevant, delivered through services people already use every day. For most subscribers, AI monetization does not look like anything dramatic. It looks like an app that understands them a little better than it did last year.

SuperApps: The Next Frontier for AI Monetization

One idea that keeps coming up across the industry is the AI powered SuperApp. Muljono describes it as an interesting new market niche, though he is careful to note that building one successfully requires more than ambition. It needs a real understanding of market demand, tangible added value for users, interoperability between services, and a business model that can actually sustain itself over time.

The opportunity is large enough to explain the excitement. According to research from Grand View Research, the global SuperApp market was valued at roughly 121.1 billion US dollars in 2025 and is projected to grow to about 968.77 billion US dollars by 2033. Sarwoto Atmosutarno, Chairman of the Indonesian Telematics Society, or Mastel, believes that building an AI based SuperApp will become close to a requirement for operators to remain relevant over the next three to four years, as mobile and fixed line services increasingly blend together and the line between B2B and B2C narrows to mostly a matter of volume. He also points out that telecom companies could cooperate with one another to interconnect their SuperApps rather than compete in isolation, and argues that the traditional balance of delivery, price, and quality needs a fundamentally different approach, one that AI based SuperApps are well positioned to deliver.

B2B Still Drives Most of the Revenue

Even with all the attention on consumer facing AI, business customers remain the more established source of income. Marwan O. Baasir, Executive Director of the Indonesian Telecommunications Operators Association, or ATSI, says AI in the B2B segment is still used mainly to boost operational efficiency. Andri Herawan Sasoko at Telkom agrees, describing AI as a tool aimed at helping businesses raise productivity, tighten process efficiency, extract better insight from data, and support digital transformation that can actually be measured.

That said, Muljono argues that AI solutions for enterprise clients have already become a genuine new revenue stream for XLSMART, not just an efficiency tool. He points to the company's ESTA ecosystem, short for Enterprise Smart Technology and Automation, which includes ESTA Prime, ESTA eco, ESTA connect 5G, and ESTA vision. These offerings bring together AI, data platforms, cloud infrastructure, cybersecurity, and industrial IoT into a single integrated package for enterprise customers, effectively turning AI monetization into a concrete, sellable product rather than an internal upgrade.

Bundling Premium AI Features Into Everyday Plans

Nailul Huda, Director of the Digital Economy program at the Center of Economics and Law Studies, or Celios, offers a useful way to frame the shift. AI, he says, has long been viewed as an efficiency technology, useful for things like more targeted advertising. Increasingly, though, it is being viewed as a tool that can generate revenue on a much larger scale, since AI can be combined with almost any sector to help collect more income. One concrete example is bundling premium AI powered services directly into subscription packages, a tactic that already has a long history in telecom through OTT bundling and similar arrangements.

This pattern is not unique to Indonesia. International research from firms such as IDC and Juniper Research has flagged very similar themes for 2026, describing telecom operators moving past the experimentation phase and toward agentic AI systems that can manage customer interactions and generate measurable commercial value with less manual oversight. The common thread across these reports is that AI monetization works best when it is tied to a specific, well scoped use case rather than treated as a blanket upgrade across the entire business.

Where This Leaves the Industry

Connectivity itself is becoming harder to differentiate. With price competition intense and margins thin, operators are increasingly betting on AI driven digital experiences, business platforms, and industry specific solutions as their next real source of growth. The success of AI adoption in telecom will not be judged only by how much it trims from operating costs. It will be judged by whether it can help build new business models capable of generating revenue that lasts.

For Indonesia's telecom sector, that is really what AI monetization comes down to. It is less about chasing a single breakthrough product and more about steadily building the personalization, the enterprise platforms, and the SuperApp ecosystems that can turn artificial intelligence from a cost center into a durable growth engine for years to come.