Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) stands as an era-defining platform for change, which will shape the future of business. It will not only accelerate innovation but fundamentally alter the dynamics of commercial relationships, enabling businesses to operate on unprecedented scales of efficiency and personalisation. 

It can transform projects, augmenting people power to help individuals and teams reach their potential. Never have businesses had such control over data: envisioning it, building complex information-heavy data sets, simulating scenarios and drawing conclusions.

No wonder, then, that building AI capabilities is the top technology priority for 11% of multi-national corporations and 16% of UK enterprises, according to recent research into interconnectivity from BT and ISG.

Strategies are being drawn up right now in businesses around the world to speed up time to market, create new routes to profitability, and envision alternative commercial models, proving each new strand of business against the company’s overall revenue and profitability.

No one knows the full extent of the changes GenAI will bring, nor the form they will take, only that change– with all the attending opportunities for fast growth– is guaranteed. Organisations must adapt quickly or be left in the wake of others.

GenAI is only as powerful as the infrastructure that underpins it, so many organisations are either undertaking, or at least planning, large-scale improvements to their IT estates.

GenAI means potentially vast amounts of data ingested by language models (large and small) within your network, across different organisations and third party private and public organisations.

Hyperscalers help organisations to deal with the pace of change and the hard-to-predict impact through their flexible cloud computing resources, such as processing and storage. But the same flexibility is required for their connectivity. They must strike the ideal balance between factors such as latency, bandwidth and cost. This means ensuring data is either processed efficiently locally, at the edge, or can travel freely without congestion to the large language model (LLM), often hosted in the cloud.

The telco edge can be considered the ‘Goldilocks location’, providing the ideal conditions to straddle edge and cloud. Providing seamless, dense interconnectivity at the telco edge, drives improved user experience for accessing digital apps and services.

To work effectively, and for the best results, AI relies on diverse data inputs and a variety of information that is both deep and wide. The source of these data inputs, and their size, are dictated by an organisation’s AI strategy and use cases, plus its data governance framework.

LLMs, as well as small language models (smaller in scale and scope than their larger counterparts), use big data sets to create generalised learning structures, initially to train AI language models quickly; broader and more accurate insights are then derived from smaller sets.

All this needs AI-ready connectivity, but traditional network infrastructure has largely failed to keep pace and offers both poor performance and a poor user experience with long lead-times and lack of digital control. This is hindering organisations’ GenAI adoption and transformation efforts.

To offer AI-interconnectivity , networks must adopt the same technical and commercial flexibility as hyperscalers in delivering computing power and storage. 

A great example of this is the Global Fabric NaaS solution from BT, which simplifies multi-cloud connectivity, security and infrastructure for organisations, with resilient and sustainable design. It is scalable and flexible, both in the quality of connectivity and the convenience of pay-as-you-use.

LLMs process large amounts of sensitive and confidential data, meaning data security is critical to prevent unauthorised access from bad actors, as well as accidental or deliberate data breaches.

Security measures like encryption and robust access controls are vital for maintaining data integrity and reliability; such measures help to ensure data accuracy and consistency, and prevent data tampering, model poisoning and theft.

The importance of this is particularly stark given recent BT research encompassing UK enterprises and multi-national corporates (MNCs), which found cyber security a pressing concern for both groups.

Some 19% of MNCs cited digital defences as their top technology priority heading into 2025, while 16% place it second and 9% third. For UK enterprises the results were even starker, 21% marking it as their top priority, 22% placing it second and 8% third.

Moreover, in a separate BT study, this time in conjunction with Microsoft, business and IT leaders described how data security and data sovereignty) is prompting major network upgrades across organisations.

More than nine in ten (91%) leaders identified the security and sovereignty as the number one likely technical reason for a future upgrade. However, as detailed above, the overall effectiveness will be hindered if your connectivity partner only offers a traditional telco experience, for example, lacking dense peering with your security from the cloud (SSE) partners. I will explore security considerations in more depth in my next blog

With the right partners at their side, businesses can soar in the GenAI era, confident in the knowledge that the fundamentals of interconnectivity and security are taken care of and free to explore the universe of opportunities on offer.

NaaS solutions, such as BT’s Global Fabric , have been deliberately designed to maximise the potential of the Telco Edge and truly make in a Goldilocks location. It completely transforms networking challenges into simple, automated processes that scale with your Gen AI business needs. Connectivity and security are designed and deployed as an integrated solution, tailored to your needs and flexible enough to cope with whatever challenges AI throws at you over the next decade.