Open Telco AI: Build Agentic Evaluations for Telecom - Workshop & Hackathon

Telecom needs its own SWE-Bench. Spend an afternoon building it. 

A three-hour hands-on workshop and hackathon co-hosted by GSMA and China Telecom at MWC Shanghai 2026. Teams turn real China Telecom use cases into agentic evaluations; a panel of judges picks the winners. 

Generic AI benchmarks are multiple-choice questions; picking the right answer based on telecom knowledge is a long way from operating a real network. Agentic evaluations are tasks where an agent does the actual work and gets graded on the result. This session is where telecom’s benchmark gets built. 

What you’ll do 

You work in a team of four to five. Your team logs into the Open Telco submission app and picks one of the real use cases contributed by China Telecom: multi-domain fault localization, say, or automated security alert triage. You then recreate that use case as a task family: a set of graded tasks that test whether an AI agent can actually do the work. You get two tools: 

• Rowter, an experimental agent that gives you access to the telecom knowledge created in Open Telco; ask it what you would ask a domain expert. 

• The Art of Evals, the guide on how to build agentic evaluations, written by the session’s main speaker, Enrique Molero. 

Mentors from GSMA, China Telecom and Open Telco AI circulate throughout. Submissions close at 18:00; the judging panel scores every task family and the top three teams present. 

Prizes 

A £3,000 cash pool across the top three teams, plus five MWC Shanghai 2027 passes for the winning team. 

Who should come 

The best evals pair operator depth with AI skill, so we want teams that mix both: network engineers, OSS and BSS specialists, telecom developers, AI and ML engineers, researchers, students and operator domain experts. 

Bring a laptop with a browser; there is nothing to install. If you register as an individual we will match you with a team on the day. 

What you leave with 

You leave knowing how to design agentic evaluations for telecom. 

Also in the room 

The day closes with the awards ceremony for the Telco Troubleshooting Agentic Challenge, a virtual competition hosted on Zindi. 

Agenda 

Doors open: 14:50