Best Use of Thought Leadership
EY worked with telecommunications company Liberty Global to put it at the forefront of industry discussion and transformation around AI regulation and sustainability – producing two groundbreaking thought leadership reports that have delivered an innovative reshaping of telecommunications industry strategies and investments, as well as influencing global policy discussions.
The telecommunications industry is embracing artificial intelligence (AI) to benefit its operations and customers. The industry’s pioneering approach also helps other sectors benefit from AI. As the critical infrastructure enabling AI adoption everywhere, telecommunications companies needed to articulate their leadership more clearly, while providing comprehensive and quantitative evidence demonstrating their economic and environmental impact.
Liberty Global has positioned itself at the forefront of industry transformation, influencing policy discussions on AI regulation and sustainability across its key markets in the US, the UK and Europe. To drive the discussion, Liberty Global teamed up with the EY team to produce two groundbreaking and authoritative thought leadership reports.
The initiative tackled an ambitious analytical challenge: no previous study had quantified telecommunications’ role in enabling AI’s benefits across the global economy. Creating rich case studies backed by key statistics on AI initiatives, and their role in energy consumption, emissions and e-waste, required us to coordinate multiple workstreams, overcome data fragmentation and balance academic rigour with commercial relevance.
The project showcased close collaboration between Liberty Global’s operational experts and EY’s AI and sustainability specialists. In particular, the thought leadership pieces demanded several methodological innovations from EY, such as calculating network-dependency across occupations, and creating four future scenarios for AI and sustainability.
Overall, the reports produced landmark findings:
- Wired for AI: A first-of-its-kind report quantifying how telecommunications networks enable 70% of jobs globally to benefit from AI – revealing US$33 billion in potential yearly productivity gains within the sector and approximately US$7 trillion economy-wide.
- Smarter Networks, Greener Planet: A visionary outlook on sustainability, showing how networks could use AI to handle 50x more data while only marginally increasing energy use.
Unlike conventional thought leadership, the EY team delivered rigorous data analysis, futures thinking and practical case studies while leveraging the strong partnership with Liberty Global. The result was an innovative reshaping of industry strategies and investments as well as global policy discussions. Impacts include:
High-profile global launches and coverage
We reached over 2,000 industry leaders through strategic launch events at the World Economic Forum in Davos and the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona (2024/2025). Additional briefings in London and Brussels engaged over 100 journalists, policymakers and other stakeholders – and gained top-tier media coverage including The Financial Times and Politico.
Directly influenced policy
The reports secured Liberty Global meetings with EU Commissioners to shape AI and sustainability policy. In March 2025, its CEO presented the findings at the Global System for Mobile Communicators Association Board meeting to CEOs of the world’s leading mobile operators, cementing Liberty Global’s position as the premier thought leader on AI in the telecommunications industry.
Permanent impact on industry dialogue
The reports have simultaneously elevated Liberty Global’s role and the strategic importance of AI discussions within the telecommunications industry – advancing the narrative from theoretical technology discussions to evidence-based conversations about economic value and environmental impact.
Established a blueprint for thought leadership collaboration
We established a new model for thought leadership development that broke down the traditional barriers between consulting firms and clients.
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