By Shruti Menon Seeboo
When Veemal Gungadin, Chief Executive Officer of Mauritius Telecom, took to the stage at the AllMyT Summit in Pailles, he did not arrive with slides full of aspirational targets and distant promises. He arrived with a live demo of an AI agent speaking Mauritian Creole, a signed memorandum of understanding with Amazon Web Services, a newly launched Mauritius AI Registry, and a portfolio of products either already in market or weeks away from being so. His keynote address was, in his own words, about “slew of things that we’re launching today” — and it lived up to that billing.
The address was structured around three pillars that Mauritius Telecom sees as the architecture of its next twenty years: connectivity, Sovereign AI, and the intelligent platform that ties them together. Each pillar was illustrated not with theory but with product, partnership, and proof of concept. What emerged was a portrait of a national telecom operator that has made a deliberate and irreversible bet on artificial intelligence — not as a feature, but as the foundation of everything it does.
Connectivity: Building the Backbone
Gungadin opened with the business that Mauritius Telecom has always been built on — connecting people, businesses, and institutions — and showed how that core mandate is being substantially extended. On subsea connectivity, he was tantalising rather than specific, confirming that work is under way behind the scenes and promising announcements in the near future. “There are lots of things that are happening right now,” he said. “And on this one, very soon, we will be coming up with some announcements there.”
On business connectivity, he unveiled MyT SASE — a managed service that bundles connectivity with security, ensuring that employees and applications connect safely and reliably. He also announced a new CCTV managed service for businesses of all sizes, offering secure cloud storage and physical security management. “Today, in Africa, we’re one of the only telcos who are providing this full suite of connectivity,” he told delegates.
For consumers, the portfolio is equally expansive. Gungadin walked delegates through the full range of what he calls “MyT Everywhere” — encompassing fixed wireless access, fibre broadband, smart multi-room Wi-Fi, and the newly launched FTTR, or Fibre to the Room, for households requiring ultra-high-speed connectivity in every room. He also unveiled a new version of MyT Travel, combining eSIM technology with roaming in a single seamless product. “There’s no need to change any SIM cards,” he said. “You just buy different packs of data based on the destination that you’re going to. And then that’s it — just works. This is a very first where we’re basically combining the eSIM technology with roaming technology and having that all together.”
On digital safety, he outlined the expanding MyT Protect umbrella — which already includes SIM-level protection against malicious connections and, through a partnership with Norton, a family tool that allows parents to monitor and control their children’s online activity. A third phase, targeting scam protection, is planned for later in the year. “Scam protection is something that’s becoming a problem not just in Mauritius, but pretty much worldwide,” he said.
Sovereign AI: Building Intelligence From the Ground Up
The centrepiece of Gungadin’s address was Mauritius Telecom’s push into Sovereign AI — the ambition not merely to use artificial intelligence but to build and own it locally, from the infrastructure up. He began with the infrastructure itself, announcing that Mauritius Telecom’s data centre now hosts NVIDIA H200 GPUs — among the most powerful AI computing units available, capable of 4,000 teraflops of processing power, compared to the 10 teraflops achievable by a high-end conventional computer. “I’m pleased to let you know that today, we already have H200 available in Mauritius in our data centre,” he said. The next generation, the B300, is due by the end of the year, with a fivefold improvement in power efficiency. “Power consumption to generate the same output reduces by five-fold,” he said. “So we’re looking forward to that.”
With the compute infrastructure in place, Gungadin turned to what Mauritius Telecom is building on top of it. MyTLearn — the AI-powered educational platform developed in partnership with the Ministry of Education — has completed pilot projects across ten schools nationwide, equipping students with a personalised AI tutor that can answer questions directly from their curriculum textbooks. But the journey revealed an important lesson about the risks of deploying AI in education. “Are we teaching kids that they should outsource their thinking rather than doing the thinking by themselves?” he asked. “Some teachers started becoming against this. Some parents started saying, I’m not too sure about this particular technology.” The response was a deliberate pivot. Rather than pushing the student-facing tool further, Mauritius Telecom refocused on teachers — building an AI coach designed to augment the teaching experience rather than bypass it. “By 2027, which is next year, our goal is to ensure that every secondary school teacher in Mauritius will have access to a personal AI coach, AI assistant,” he said. The tool can already auto-correct student homework from a phone photograph and generate customised exam papers on demand. “Once we started doing that, then we realised that teachers started seeing how AI can help in their job. And then they started embracing AI itself.”
Perhaps the most striking demonstration of Mauritius Telecom’s Sovereign AI credentials was the live reveal of what Gungadin called the Creole agent — an AI-powered call centre agent that speaks Mauritian Creole fluently, diagnoses line faults in real time, creates support tickets autonomously, and transfers calls to human agents when a situation falls outside its parameters. The agent, named Kevin, drew laughter and applause from the audience. “At midnight, who’s going to be picking up the call? Who’s going to be picking up the call at 2 a.m.?” he said. “Turns out not many people want to do night shift. So what if we could now have an AI agent that is doing the night shift?” He was careful to frame the development not as a threat to jobs but as a redeployment of human expertise. “We’re not going to go away from that. But guess what? We can now free up people because they’ve been spending 10 years really understanding customer problems, really knowing how to upsell, and then bringing them face to face in our shops — because they become like our human ambassadors.”
MyTGPT — described as a sovereign, enterprise-grade local equivalent of ChatGPT — has also evolved significantly, now integrating with Microsoft 365, Gmail, and Shopify, and capable of operating as an AI agent that communicates directly with other software platforms. Gungadin demonstrated the tool building a fully designed website in near real time from a simple text brief. “This is what the future of work looks like,” he said. “Software talking to software.”
The Intelligent Platform: Building the Ecosystem
The third and perhaps most ambitious pillar of Gungadin’s vision is Mauritius Telecom’s emergence as an intelligent platform — a foundation on which other businesses, developers, and institutions can build. Central to this is the Mauritius AI Registry, now live at airegistry.mu, which he described as a discovery engine for trusted AI resources, including models, agents, and skills. Crucially, Mauritius Telecom has open-sourced the entire stack. “What we’ve ended up doing is open-source the whole stack,” he said. “And that’s something that I’ve been pitching to global telcos, to African telcos.” The goal is for other countries and operators to adopt the same architecture, with Mauritius as the originator. “We took the lead in terms of implementing it, and hopefully we’re going to have more other telcos, other countries joining it as well.”
He also announced that Mauritius Telecom is launching what he described as a world first from a telecom perspective — Models as a Service, providing AI models directly to businesses and consumers as a managed offering, in collaboration with TM Forum, the global standards body representing over 800 telecoms and technology companies.
The partnership announcements that accompanied these product launches underlined the seriousness of Mauritius Telecom’s ambitions. The MOU signed with Amazon Web Services — confirmed by Prime Minister Ramgoolam in his earlier address and welcomed on stage by Jyoti Ball, GM of Sub-Saharan Africa for AWS — was perhaps the headline moment. “Our collaboration is built on a simple belief: that Mauritius should not only consume cloud and AI, but Mauritius should help create with them,” Ball said. “We are working together to equip Mauritians with skills to build, to help businesses and public institutions turn ideas into solutions, and really importantly, to give local innovators a pathway to scale — not just across Africa, but more widely.”
A partnership with SBM Bank was also announced, built around the creation of a shared platform designed to empower entrepreneurs and accelerate digital financial services. “If you think of a young entrepreneur today in Mauritius launching an innovative digital product, you need to think of connectivity, you need to think of financials, you need to think of customer onboarding,” said SBM’s Officer in Charge, Gervi Gua. “The idea is if we can create this platform, this will help to accelerate everything.” Gungadin framed the collaboration in terms of what two major national institutions can do when they act with a shared purpose. “What we’re really looking at here is how do we empower people, how we grow businesses, and how we enable innovation.”
Closer to home geographically, he announced the launch of cross-border payment capabilities between Mauritius and Seychelles, in partnership with Eboo, one of Seychelles’ leading fintech players — the first of what he indicated would be a series of Indian Ocean regional payment announcements.
He closed with a subject he described as close to his heart: scale-ups. Mauritius Telecom has hand-picked eight AI-native companies — most of them built in Mauritius, with others from India and Singapore being actively courted to base themselves on the island — to participate in its scale-up programme. “Now you already have some customers, but you don’t know how to grow from 10 customers to 100, or 100 customers to 1,000,” he said. “We connect all businesses in Mauritius. We connect pretty much the whole population. That’s what we can provide as a platform to scale up in Mauritius.” The ambition, he made clear, extends well beyond the island’s shores. “The ambition here is really how do we bridge that to Africa, how do we bridge to Asia.”
In a closing reflection that captured the spirit of the entire summit, Gungadin pointed to the sparkle now embedded in the MyT logo — a deliberate signal that AI is no longer an add-on to what Mauritius Telecom does, but its animating principle. “We see our role itself as mighty,” he said. “We look at ourselves as the intelligent layer of everything, of everyday Mauritius. AI now is infused in our logo. AI now is infused in everything that we’re doing. And we want to do it safely, responsibly, and for the benefit of the country and the world, hopefully, as well.”
