India, Jan. 15 -- The telecom industry is undergoing a structural shift as traffic patterns, AI workloads and ultra-low latency services redefine how networks are built and funded. Speaking on these changes, Randeep Singh Sekhon, CTO, Bharti Airtel, in conversation with Jaijit Bhattacharya, Founder and President, Centre for Digital Economy Policy Research, explained that the nature of telecom traffic itself is evolving.

Sekhon noted that AI has not fundamentally increased traffic yet, but it has changed where traffic flows. "Search has not disappeared," he said. "It has simply moved from traditional search engines to AI platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity." For now, AI-driven queries still behave like conventional data traffic,...