Why Nokia Pushes for Global AI Standards in the Telco Sector

The thing about the global rush to regulate AI is that everyone’s doing it differently.

Governments are writing their own rulebooks and companies operating across borders are trying to satisfy contradictory requirements.

So far, the telecommunications industry has managed to avoid the worst of it through international standards that keep networks talking to each other. 

Now Nokia, the Finnish telecommunications equipment maker, is setting an example for the AI industry.

How can the AI industry learn from the telco one?

When countries developed their own standards in the 19th century, we ended up in a world of incompatible sockets and voltages that still requires us to carry adaptors everywhere. 

Peter Merz, Head of Nokia Standards and Karina Palyutina, Senior Staff AI Expert in the Nokia Sustainability Standardisation team, ask: “If AI is indeed the electricity of the 21st century, does it risk a similar fate?”

“AI holds immense promise and opportunity to solve some of our most pressing and complex problems,” they add.

“Due to its potential power, many believe that it should be developed with regulatory oversight and guardrails in place.”

But is there a better way forward than having every country invent its own approach? 

The telecommunications sector has been getting this right since 1865, when the International Telecommunications Union was established. 

The industry has been prioritising international cooperation since before the telephone was even invented.

The impact of countries having different regulations

The current state of AI regulation is fragmented. 

The EU has its AI Act, sorting systems by risk level, meanwhile the US has no federal legislation, leaving individual states to figure it out themselves. 

Brazil is working on its own bill and China has gone in a different direction.

For companies trying to operate globally, this can be difficult, because “companies with global operations face a difficult challenge in reconciling the complex and evolving regulatory markets and conducting their compliance obligations coherently across potentially conflicting requirements,” Peter and Karina say.

This is where international standards bodies become useful. Organisations like the International Standards Organization, the International Electrotechnical Commission – and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development develop consensus-based standards that can inform regulatory efforts without actually replacing national laws. 

Almost like translators between different regulatory languages.

These bodies are, Peter and Karina suggest, “the missing link for innovative and responsible adoption of AI”.

How governance standards work in practice

For telecommunications, the relevant standards aren’t about technical specifications but about governance.

Unlike technical standards, governance standards guide trustworthy AI development, with a focus on non-application-specific elements of AI such as terminology and management frameworks,” Peter and Karina say.

These frameworks address how AI systems should be developed and deployed rather than the technical details of how they work. 

They cover risk management, transparency, accountability – the sorts of things that keep regulators satisfied and customers trusting a network.

This becomes increasingly relevant as the industry moves towards 6G, which is expected to embed AI far more deeply into core network operations. 

Getting governance frameworks sorted early means individual companies don’t have to reinvent the compliance wheel every time they enter a new market.

Nokia is pushing telecommunications firms to look beyond their traditional standards bodies. “As we look forward to next-generation standards like 6G, we encourage the industry to look beyond telecommunications standards and contribute also to global, multi-stakeholder bodies like ISO and CEN/CENELEC,” Peter and Karina say.

CEN and CENELEC are European standards organisations working on general technology and electrotechnical standards, complementing telecommunications-specific bodies like 3GPP, which develops mobile network standards. 

The point is to get telecommunications voices into the broader conversation about AI governance, not just the narrow technical discussions.

Given that networks underpin so much of the entire digital economy, how telecommunications handles AI governance matters well beyond the sector itself. 

Peter and Karina say that proactive engagement “will not only benefit our industry” but “will ensure that the transformative power of AI is harnessed responsibly for the entire digital economy, following the path of collaborative success rather than fragmented chaos.”