INTERVIEW: Veon CEO Kaan Terzioglu (pictured) argued operators must conduct an aggressive shake-up of their business models by abandoning the sale of raw data and instead focus on selling digital services and continue to push augmented intelligence.
Speaking at MWC25 Barcelona, Terzioglu reiterated the company’s augmented intelligence mantra that essentially gives AI a more human-touch, while insisting the future for the industry lies in developing and offering digital services to consumers.
Terzioglu said across Veon’s five operating markets it has 160 million telecoms customers, 130 million of which are digital services consumers.
The CEO pointed to a range of areas where Veon is offering services, including entertainment, banking and healthcare.
“That’s what really drives our growth. Currently, in the last quarter, 12 per cent of our revenue came from digital services not related to telecoms and that business is growing above 60 per cent. That’s really going to set the pace for the future for us as well.”
Terzioglu further opened up on augmented intelligence, stating he was not “excited” about using AI to save the operator money in its contact centres.
“Of course we are going to do that and it’s important, but these are rudimentary things. The excitement for me is how do we touch the lives of people.”
He went on to open up on a vision of how AI and agentic AI could one day help someone living in Kazakhstan, for example, use a large language model to become a better mother, or a better teacher, doctor or nurse.
He added Veon operates in countries where English, German and French are not the main languages, and instead the operator dealt with people speaking Urdu, Bengali, Uzbek, Kazakh and Ukrainian.
“That’s why we have to work harder to make sure that these local languages are as good as any other big seven languages in the world in terms of providing value.”
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