Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison (IOH): A Case Study in Telco Automation, AI, and AN

This profile addresses the role of automation, autonomous networks (AN), and AI/GenAI in Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison’s (IOH’s) telco operations. The goal of this series is to answer how deployment of these technologies can cut costs and create new revenues, and identify which telcos are achieving tangible margin gains from their investments.

IOH is Indonesia’s second-largest mobile operator, formed from the January 2022 merger of Indosat (already part of Ooredoo) and Hutchison 3 Indonesia. The company serves 93.7M mobile subscribers across Indonesia. FY2025 revenue was IDR 56,518 billion (B) (~US$3.4B), growing only 1.1% year on year in local currency, a sharp deceleration from 9.1% in FY2024. EBIT margin was 19.9% for the year, a bit higher than 2024’s 19.4% and comfortably higher than the global average of 15.7%. Capex surged 33.6% in 2025 to IDR 13,280 billion (23.5% of revenue), signaling heavy investment in AI infrastructure; that capex growth accelerated in 1Q26 with a nearly 60% YoY jump. Personnel costs fell 11% to IDR 3,450B in 2025, reflecting workforce optimization across a headcount of approximately 4,200. Net debt/EBITDA stood at 0.39x as of FY2025, among the lowest leverage ratios for an operator of IOH’s scale.

MTN Consulting rates Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison as 4.2 out of 5.0 in the maturity of its efforts around automation, AI and AN. IOH demonstrates high technical depth, especially for a resource-constrained developing-market operator: IOH’s Digital Intelligence Operations Center (DIOC) consolidates 110 AI use cases across 53,000+ sites, the company champions a TM Forum Level 4 AN Catalyst with ANLAV certification, and it has launched Indonesia’s first sovereign large language model and a commercially contracted GPU cloud. IOH has also benefited from a tight relationship with Huawei, which has helped it navigate M&A integration, interoperability and automation/AI implementation issues. What pushes the score above 4 is IOH’s real AI data center investments and its transparent approach to knowledge sharing and industry collaboration. However, IOH’s production network has not received a formal AN level declaration; and AI-driven efficiency gains (personnel costs -11%, MTTR -15%) remain early and unverified by independent parties. A move towards 4.5 would require documented Level 3+ production-grade autonomy across the live network and NeoCloud exceeding 5% of total revenue.