The President and CEO of the OTE Group, Kostas Nembis, during his participation in the Growthfund Investor Summit 2026.
Opening his remarks, Mr. Nembis noted that network infrastructure forms the foundation for growth in the AI era. As he aptly put it, “There can be no AI-ready economy without AI-ready network infrastructure. Networks are the prerequisite for progress; they are the highways on which all applications run.”
The head of OTE pointed out that the demands of artificial intelligence applications are constantly multiplying and require networks with minimal latency, increased upload capacity, dynamic slicing, high security, and computing power. As he noted, OTE ensures that, in this new AI reality, the country has the connectivity it needs.
In the mobile sector, OTE’s networks set the country apart on a global scale. Specifically, nationwide population coverage for its 5G network exceeds 99%, and for 5G SA, it exceeds 82%. Thanks to this 5G SA network, Greece ranked first in Europe and fourth in the world in terms of download speeds, according to a recent analysis by Ookla.
OTE’s contribution is also decisive in the fixed-line sector, with its investments propelling Greece ever higher on the digital map. Concrete evidence of this comes from a recent European Commission report, which states that, by 2025, fiber-optic networks in Greece had expanded at a rate four times faster than the European average.
Today, the Group operates the largest fiber-optic network in the country, with its infrastructure covering more than 2.2 million households and businesses and continuing to expand, with the goal of reaching 3.5 million by 2030.
When asked about the adoption of AI, Mr. Nebis emphasized that OTE is not just now discovering Artificial Intelligence, as it has been utilizing it for years, and it has recently become a pillar of the Group’s strategy. “Our goal is to evolve into a ‘digital first’ and, gradually, an ‘AI-native’ company, making exemplary use of artificial intelligence,” he noted.
In this regard, AI has already become part of OTE’s DNA, with the company integrating AI into the daily lives of both its employees and its customers.
Specifically, the Group is developing AI Assistants across various functions, leveraging Conversational AI in customer service, and providing its employees with AskT, an innovative AI assistant based on OpenAI technology. As Mr. Nebis noted, more than 25% of the company’s processes are already AI-augmented, with the goal of increasing this percentage to 40% by the end of the year.
At the same time, OTE is sharing the expertise it has gained from its own transformation with all of its customers. For businesses, the company—with the support of its parent company, TELEKOM—is building a portfolio of specialized solutions to meet every need. Among other things, it has launched new data center infrastructure for business cloud services, including GPU-as-a-Service solutions for artificial intelligence applications. This gives businesses access to high computing power for AI applications without having to build their own infrastructure from scratch.
Regarding the general public, the head of OTE spoke about the “democratization of AI.” As he noted, “OTE offers leading AI tools (e.g., Perplexity, ElevenLabs, Picsart) through Magenta AI, which is available on the COSMOTE TELEKOM app. Our goal is to put AI in everyone’s hands.”