Behind the World’s First AI-Native Telco Platform with Circles’ Gaurav Tandon

The world’s first AI-native telco platform is here. In late August, global technology company Circles announced a landmark global collaboration with OpenAI to build a fully AI-native SaaS platform aimed at enabling operators worldwide to unlock deeper consumer intelligence, operational productivity, customer support excellence, and profitability. The partnership combines Circles’ expertise in digital telco innovation with OpenAI’s cutting-edge research, setting the stage for a new generation of AI-powered experiences for consumers and operators alike. The platform will debut in Singapore, powering Circles.Life’s app, before scaling to Circles’ global telco partners.

A shared vision

As part of the new platform, Circles will combine its deep consumer understanding and operator expertise with OpenAI’s industry-leading models to showcase the potential for AI in text, voice, image and vision.

Reflecting on why OpenAI was the partner of choice for this project, Gaurav Tandon, VP of Product & AI Innovation at Circles, points to a fundamental alignment in values and ambition. “Our partnership with OpenAI was a result of a shared common vision, values and technical DNA,” he says. “OpenAI is a global leader in AI research and has pioneered the rapid advancement and adoption of AI amongst consumers and enterprises over the past decade. Both Circles and OpenAI have a strong track record of pushing the boundaries of technology application and share a common vision for using technology to fundamentally reimagine entire industries from the ground up. Both companies have been disruptors in their respective fields and believe in rapid innovation to maintain a first mover advantage.”

This multi-year collaboration will also give Circles access to OpenAI’s early-stage models and research programs, positioning Circles at the forefront of inventing new AI benchmarks for the telco industry. Gaurav shares what this means for the company, explaining, “The possibilities of AI applications are evolving at a rapid pace and access to OpenAI’s early stage research allows Circles to showcase the potential of AI in the telco industry and build a first mover advantage by co-creating this platform with OpenAI. Circles is building fully AI-native BSS systems which power hyper-personalized agentic experiences for telco subscribers and unprecedented levels of efficiency and profitability for telco operators.”

Additionally, Gaurav highlights how this falls into Circles’ broader ambitions, elaborating, “Circles has been at the forefront of technology adoption, starting with the first digital telco through Circles.Life in Singapore and then creating a fully digital SaaS platform for digital transformation of telcos globally. With OpenAI’s research and technology, Circles aims to take this to the next level by fundamentally re-imagining digital connectivity in the AI era. Most legacy telcos and telco vendors are embedding AI, if at all, into existing legacy systems, which only provides marginal gains to legacy data and architecture issues. That’s why we’re building a fully AI-native telco platform from the ground up.”

Personalization at scale

By tapping on OpenAI’s latest technology, Circles aims to radically transform consumers’ digital experiences as well. The AI-native platform is set to power a pathbreaking agentic AI app that understands context, adapts to users’ digital lifestyles and delivers personalized experiences across connectivity, shopping, travel, gaming, wellness and more.

Gaurav tells us what this means for users, explaining, “Over the past two years, we’ve seen a clear shift: consumers are no longer satisfied with one-size-fits-all products. They’re demanding personalization, convenience, and experiences that fit their lifestyle — and they’re willing to pay for it. Circles is integrating OpenAI’s agent architecture with our proprietary data intelligence platform to create adaptive and agentic experiences for telco subscribers. With this new platform and app architecture, telco subscribers will experience a hyper-personalized and fluidic app journey, starting from tailor-made plans during onboarding and usage-based personalization of plans to seamless AI-powered app navigation and personal AI concierges to take actions on their behalf. Users no longer have to be satisfied with off-the-shelf products when they can have their own personal telco and digital lifestyle app.”

He highlights, “At Circles, understanding our users is core to everything we build. We pay deep attention to customer feedback and look at how they actually use the product, to figure out what really matters to them.”

Beyond connectivity

For Circles, the partnership with OpenAI is more than just a one-time collaboration — the two companies are excited to explore various other frontiers in AI for telecoms, building off their mutual synergies and capabilities. “Our partnership with OpenAI is a multi-year collaboration and we’ll continue pushing the boundaries of the AI-native platform in line with AI advancements in the industry,” Gaurav affirms. “So, this is not a single product collaboration. Stay tuned for more announcements in the future as we release more AI-native products.”

Gaurav reflects on this promise, concluding, “Telcos are at the core of everything users do in their digital journeys, yet telcos have been laggards in innovating to improve the digital experiences of users. At Circles, we’re building a telco platform that transforms telcos to technology platforms powering more than just connectivity. Through our solutions like XploreAI, Zerofy, Circle of Joy and Jetpac, we’re building global ecosystems of integrated partners across commerce, content, gaming, fintech, wellness, travel and more, enabling seamless digital journeys and unbeatable value for users and partners. With our AI advancements, we’re now evolving these ecosystems into personal AI concierges that adapt and act on users’ behalf, taking value and convenience to unprecedented levels for users and partners.”

Redefining the telco model

Circles’ collaboration with OpenAI may be aimed at transforming telco experiences for Circles.Life users first, but its ambitions are global. By building a fully AI-native platform — and opening that platform to telco partners worldwide — Circles hopes to prove a new model for operators: one where AI drives personalization, efficiency and new revenue streams across commerce, content and services. If successful, the move could redefine what it means to be a telco in an AI-first world.