Bas Burger, CEO, International, at BT launched BT International on 2 June 2025: a dedicated operation within BT Group with its own people, products and platforms.
Rationale for BT International
On a BT Group Newsroom Blog, Burger wrote:
It comes as our customers face unprecedented disruption across their markets driven by geopolitics, regulation and technology — with AI catalysing change faster than ever. We have designed BT International specifically to help our customers meet these challenges head on and anticipate future opportunities to thrive.
The way we do this centres on two highly scalable telco platforms designed for the age of multi-cloud and AI: Global Voice and Global Fabric, with security built in by design. We’ve channelled our investments into these cloud-centric global platforms and concentrated our expert teams where customers need them most.
We see that AI has unpredictable impacts on our customers’ networks — from the lumpy, bulky training workloads of large language models (LLMs) powering GenAI to the low latency demands of conversational AI and augmented reality. These trends are set against the backdrop of a rapidly evolving cyber security threat landscape and a fast-moving regulatory environment.
BT International’s Global Voice platform
The Global Voice platform enables businesses, governments and their clients, customers and partners to communicate with each other. BT manage over 16 billion calls to customer call centres in over 70 countries every year. BT have migrated these services onto a new SIP-powered, cloud focussed platform enabling voice to be carried across data networks. Global Voice is both SIP-powered and cloud-focused and thus can unlock the full potential of integrating voice with AI.
Gartner predicts that 30% of Fortune 500 companies will offer customer service through only a single, AI-enabled channel by 2028. Burger commented: “I believe our Global Voice platform is strongly positioned to enable this, backed by our experts who have delivered over 5,000 contact centres to over 2,000 customers around the world.”
BT International’s Global Fabric
Global Fabric is BT International’s brand-new, AI-ready, cloud-centric network-as-a-service (NaaS) platform. It offers customers instant, secure and resilient connectivity to almost every app or digital service, including the world’s top cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers.
Burger explains BT’s Global Fabric as, “With traditional networks, setting up or making changes to connectivity for a new or existing app, including AI, could take days or weeks. With Global Fabric, it happens in an instant…With Global Fabric, customers can choose both the cloud destinations their data goes to and the route it takes along the way. This means regulated data never leaves the designated national borders and helps customers stay compliant.”
BT International Future Outlook
BT believe international networks will gravitate towards fewer, larger, telco platforms able to manage the demand generated by increased cloud and AI services.
BT International is inviting other service providers to work with them, as they build out their ecosystem of partners, including their recently announced partnership with Google Cloud.
