If one word defined Day One at the Bali Annual Telecommunication International Conference (BATIC) 2025, it was urgency. Urgency to invest, to collaborate, to rebuild trust, and to adapt to an AI-driven digital economy. Leaders from across the telecom and technology ecosystem—subsea providers, carriers, hyperscalers, messaging platforms, and cloud giants—charted a course that was at once optimistic and sobering.
The world’s digital center of gravity is moving east. Demographics, infrastructure spending, and the raw pace of adoption are converging in Asia-Pacific. “Asia-Pacific is where population scale meets the digital future. This is where all the action is,” said Jayanth Nagarajan, Head of Telco APAC at AWS.
If Asia-Pacific is the stage, Indonesia is in the spotlight. “Indonesia is not just a market of productivity. It’s becoming a true hub of the Indo-Pacific,” said Budi Satria Dharma Purba, CEO of Telin, pointing to the $2.6 billion Indonesia Capital Express (ICE) subsea cable as a bet on global centrality. The ambition is bold: AI campuses with universities, public-private partnerships, a digital ecosystem where Indonesia is not only consuming but producing innovation. But the risks are real. “The only regret we ever have in building cables is this: why didn’t we invest more?” Budi warned, reflecting on long lead times and surging demand.
For all the optimism, the sessions on messaging and communications carried a darker undercurrent: trust is fraying. “Trust is where we start, and trust is where we end. It is the foundation of communications,” said Kharisma, CCO of Telin. But consumers aren’t buying it. Lim Li San, COO of Dialog Axiata, described the phenomenon as “push fatigue”. Spam, robocalls, and fraud have made users deeply wary. “Even when we tried to give customers free upgrades, 40% wouldn’t pick up our calls,” she said. Pushpendra Singh, Global Director of Telco Messaging and API at Meta, was blunter: “One-time passwords (OTPs) are largely dead. The future is in-thread, trusted communication integrated directly with telcos.” And Nabil Baccouche, Group Chief Carrier and Wholesale Officer of e&, admitted what many were mentioning: “It’s sad to see that as an industry, the mobile ecosystem has failed. We pushed prices too high, volumes collapsed, and trust was lost.” The prescription was consistent: rebuild trust through standards, transparency, and shared responsibility across carriers, OTTs, regulators, and enterprises.
Artificial intelligence (AI) hovered over every conversation, both as promise and pressure. Microsoft’s Derrick Buckley, Managing Director of Media & Telco Asia, stripped away the hedging: “This is not an iteration. This is a platform shift. AI will redefine industries far beyond telco.” The implication was clear: carriers aren’t just moving traffic anymore. They’re being pulled into the core of a new economic model, where hyperscale reach and local intimacy at the edge have to coexist. For Microsoft, the case is already empirical. “This is not pilot-scale,” added Buckley. “Our engineers are completing tasks 55% faster. Sales close rates are up 20%. Legal responds 32% quicker. This is enterprise-wide adoption.”
China Unicom Global’s Paul Guohua Liu, SVP of Carrier Business, described the new ecosystem: “It’s no longer just carriers and networks. It’s platforms, content, applications, and industry-specific AI models. That requires new investment and new skills.” Telin, too, is leaning in with an AI Center of Excellence, designed to test and scale models with universities and enterprises alike. But Meta’s Singh put his finger on the user demand driving it all: “Consumers no longer want to enter six-digit OTPs. They want seamless identity, instant authentication, and trust built in. That’s where AI and APIs converge.”
Underneath the software dreams are hard physical limits. “We are touching fundamental limits in space, power, and spectrum. There are no easy upgrades left,” warned Dr. Eduardo Mateo, Chief Strategy Officer at NEC. From Eddie Tay, VP of Networks - APAC and VP of Sales at Equinix, the view was equally urgent: “AI is a huge workload flow between hubs. Data centers are the foundation, and we are racing to build across ASEAN, in particular Jakarta, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand.” But supply chains are straining. “Everybody is building cables now,” Pak Budi noted. “The challenge is not just manufacturing but implementation. Projects take five to seven years. Can we deliver in time?” Virginie Frouin, CBO of BW Digital, added to the planning dilemma: “How do you place branches when demand is unclear? You need to build fat cables, more fiber pairs, and diversify routes. Scale is the only answer.”
For all the focus on capacity, the security issue loomed. “Cybersecurity keeps me awake at night. One breach can compromise billions of accounts,” said Frederick Chui, CEO of PCCW Global. Singh described how even “trusted aggregators” could pass along fraudulent OTP traffic. “Trying to solve this with firewalls is not enough. We need new models.”
If there was one recurrent theme across BATIC so far, it is that partnership and collaboration are the only path to success. “Those who don’t [partner] will simply not exist in 2030,” said Dialog Axiata’s Group COO, Lim Li San. Chui of PCCW Global was even simpler: “Partnership is in our DNA. No one can build this alone.” Meta’s Singh urged carriers to move faster: “We put operators into two brackets: those who move forward are the ones that reap the benefits, while those who resist, go nowhere.” Infobip’s Telecom Business Director, Goran Valjak, crystallized the balancing act: “You can’t have 100% privacy and 100% protection. Balance is the only answer.”
By the end of Day 1 sessions, the themes converged into four imperatives: scale faster, with subsea, data centers, and edge connectivity keeping pace with 35–40% annual traffic growth; rebuild trust by combating fraud, spam, and fatigue; embed AI responsibly, balancing innovation with privacy, security, and inclusion; and forge ecosystems, aligning carriers, hyperscalers, regulators, and enterprises in win-win models.
“This is not just about building networks,” said Pak Budi of Telin. “It’s about building trust, building capabilities, and building the future.”
BATIC 2025 impresses for its tropical setting, even more for its stark clarity. Asia-Pacific isn’t just catching up. It is defining the future of digital infrastructure. But infrastructure alone won’t deliver it. Trust, scale, AI, and collaboration must come together, or the Indo-Pacific hub will remain an unrealized promise. Or as Dialog Axiata’s Li San put it: “The future belongs to those who create win-win ecosystems.” In the race to 2030, the winners will be the ones who take that line seriously, and turn it into reality the fastest.