With the arrival of DeepSeek—the cheap Chinese-made equivalent to ChatGPT—triggering stock market bedlam this week, it was serendipitous that a highly relevant report arrived in the Faultline in-tray with data on the progress and return-on-investment of operator AI strategies. Headline findings include that 65% of operators have implemented an AI strategy, either as a standalone initiative or integrated into broader objectives. Of these, AI-driven investments in critical areas account for between 5% to 15% of operators’ total digital budgets, ranging from large language models (LLMs) to infrastructure upgrades. However, the Q4 2024 AI report—the third installation in a four-part series from the GSMA—warns that nearly half of operators are still in the early stages of AI projects, running pilots or…