The Summer AI Started Selling FMC

An end-of-summer update from IQ Mobile - and a few thoughts on where mobile, AI and business communications are heading next.

Something interesting has been happening at IQ Mobile over the last few months.

We’ve had a noticeable number of enquiries from businesses that found us through ChatGPT, Claude and other AI tools.

That in itself is interesting. We spend plenty of time thinking about SEO, marketing, events, partnerships and all the usual ways people discover telecoms companies. Now we have another route into the business:

“AI told me I should speak to you.”

I’m certainly not complaining.

What’s more interesting, though, is what these businesses were asking AI in the first place.

They weren’t generally searching for FMC.

They had a telephony problem.

They wanted mobile users properly integrated into their communications platform. They wanted calls recorded. They wanted a mobile number to behave like an extension. They wanted better visibility of mobile conversations. They wanted SMS captured alongside everything else. They wanted their CRM, analytics, AI or reporting tools to understand what was happening on mobile.

In several cases, somewhere during that conversation, AI effectively concluded:

“What you’re describing sounds like Fixed Mobile Convergence.”

And suddenly FMC becomes the silver bullet.

Well… perhaps not quite a silver bullet. Telecoms has taught me to be suspicious of anything described as one of those.

But it does solve a surprisingly large number of problems.

FMC is becoming much more than “your mobile is an extension”

We’ve deliberately taken a slightly different approach to FMC.

Rather than spending all our energy chasing enterprise customers directly, we’ve concentrated on working with MSPs, resellers, UC providers, VoIP platforms and development teams that already own the customer relationship.

We provide the mobile capability.

They decide what to build around it.

And that second part has turned out to be one of the most exciting bits.

Because almost every platform we work with has a slightly different idea of what FMC should become.

Some partners are integrating it into their own mobile applications, adding functions such as hold, transfer and conferencing around the FMC SIM.

Others are combining mobile calls with AI transcription, sentiment analysis, conversation intelligence and real-time reporting.

Others want the mobile device to become another completely visible endpoint inside their existing UC environment — rather than the slightly awkward cousin sitting outside it.

The list keeps growing.

And frankly, some of the ideas are really cool.

It has reinforced something I’ve believed for a while:

The future of FMC isn't simply convergence. It's what developers can build once mobile becomes programmable.

That distinction matters.

The mobile network is becoming a development platform

This isn't just something we're seeing at IQ Mobile.

The wider telecoms industry is moving in exactly this direction.

The GSMA is putting significant weight behind open standards, network APIs and interoperability through initiatives such as Open Gateway. The aim is essentially to make capabilities within mobile networks more accessible to developers and enterprise applications.

That's important because it changes where innovation happens.

Historically, operators built telecoms products and sold those products to customers.

The emerging model is different.

Operators expose capabilities.

Platforms combine them.

Developers build on them.

Partners package them.

And customers ultimately buy a solution to a business problem rather than a collection of telecoms products.

That becomes particularly interesting when you throw AI into the mix.

AI isn't just going to sit on top of telecoms as a clever chatbot. It can listen to, understand and act upon communications.

Imagine every mobile conversation being capable of feeding into the same intelligence layer as Teams, your contact centre and your CRM.

A salesperson finishes a call from their normal mobile dialler.

The call is automatically associated with the customer.

It's transcribed.

The sentiment is analysed.

Actions are identified.

The CRM is updated.

A follow-up task is created.

Management reporting updates.

And the salesperson simply made a phone call.

That is where this gets interesting.

SMS is probably next

One area we're currently looking at is SMS Copy.

It sounds considerably less glamorous than AI, but its potential is enormous.

Business communication increasingly happens across multiple channels. Calls might be recorded perfectly while an important customer conversation continues over SMS and suddenly disappears from the corporate record.

For regulated organisations in particular, that creates an obvious problem.

The FCA's rules around certain regulated activities already cover the recording and retention of relevant telephone conversations and electronic communications, with firms expected to maintain appropriate policies around what must be captured.

But even outside financial services there are plenty of reasons businesses may want SMS conversations copied into another platform:

Compliance and audit trails. Keep business communications available where retention policies require them.

CRM history. A customer replies to a salesperson by SMS and the conversation becomes part of the customer record rather than living exclusively on one handset.

Dispute resolution. If a customer says, “But your engineer texted me and said…”, there is actually a record.

Customer service continuity. When an employee is away, changes role or leaves the company, the history of the customer relationship doesn't disappear with their phone.

AI and analytics. Once SMS becomes accessible data, it can join calls, emails and other channels in the same conversation-intelligence layer.

The objective isn't surveillance.

It's making mobile communications part of the same governed business environment organisations already expect from email, contact centres and UC platforms.

And I think we'll see much more of this.

I left VoIP because I thought the minute was dying

There's a slightly personal angle to all of this.

I left a well-known VoIP operator some time ago because I could see the traditional voice minute declining and wanted to get back into mobile.

My thinking was fairly simple:

Name me one adult on the planet who isn't carrying a mobile phone.

Yes, I know there will technically be someone. There's always one person waiting to ruin a perfectly good marketing statement.

But you get the point.

The mobile phone has become the default communications device for most people.

Ofcom's latest research shows UK adults now spend around four and a half hours online every day, with most of that online time taking place on smartphones. WhatsApp is also among the UK's most commonly used apps.

The smartphone isn't becoming less important to business communications.

It's becoming the centre of them.

So rather than trying to persuade users to abandon the device they already carry, the opportunity is to make that device behave properly inside the business communications environment.

That is a very different proposition.

Mobile + AI + APIs is where things get interesting

The GSMA's 2026 work on AI describes an industry looking beyond connectivity towards AI applications, agents, orchestration and enterprise-specific services.

I think we're going to see those worlds converge quickly.

The network provides identity, connectivity and communications.

FMC connects mobile into the business telephony environment.

APIs expose capabilities.

AI understands what happened.

The business platform decides what to do next.

And suddenly we're not really selling minutes anymore.

We're enabling workflows.

That creates a huge opportunity for the partner channel because the clever bit doesn't necessarily have to come from the mobile operator.

In fact, I'd argue that it often shouldn't.

A specialist legal MSP understands a law firm's workflow better than we ever will.

A healthcare communications provider understands its customers.

A CRM developer understands its application.

A UC vendor understands its platform.

Our job is to give those businesses mobile capabilities they can integrate, automate and innovate around.

You bring the use case. We bring the mobile network capability.

That's a much more interesting ecosystem.

And mobile itself is getting bigger

FMC is only part of what we're seeing.

Around us, the wider mobile ecosystem is expanding into areas that would once have been treated as completely separate markets.

Through Aerix, for example, private 5G networks are already being deployed for rural communities, businesses and locations where traditional connectivity doesn't solve the problem.

The use cases stretch across manufacturing, agriculture, transport and logistics, ports and maritime, healthcare, events and other environments where reliable wireless connectivity matters.

That's another important shift.

5G isn't simply “4G but faster”.

Private 5G can become infrastructure.

It can connect cameras, sensors, machinery, autonomous equipment, workers and entire sites.

The GSMA reports that more than 70 mobile network operators globally now have live 5G Standalone networks, with enterprise use cases increasingly focused around security, automation, reliable throughput, real-time monitoring and AI-driven applications.

Then at the other end of the spectrum you've got international connectivity and travel eSIMs making it easier than ever to provision mobile connectivity digitally across borders.

Different products.

Same underlying trend.

Mobile connectivity is becoming embedded into everything.

So where does IQ Mobile fit?

That's the question we've been asking ourselves.

And I think our positioning is actually becoming simpler rather than more complicated.

If you're an MSP, reseller, software company, UC provider or business with a mobile-related problem and you're not quite sure how to solve it, talk to us.

You don't necessarily need to arrive with a product name.

You don't need to know whether you need FMC, an eSIM, an API integration, private 5G or something we haven't packaged yet.

Tell us the problem.

We've got developers who understand mobile networks and integrations.

We've got a platform that's becoming more capable all the time.

We've got salespeople who understand telecoms and aren't interested in forcing a product into a requirement where it doesn't belong.

And importantly, we're happy to consult.

Sometimes the answer might be one of our products.

Sometimes it might involve building something.

Sometimes we'll tell you there is a better way of doing it.

That's fine.

I'd much rather build a long-term partner relationship than win an order for something that doesn't work.

The challenge now isn't the technology

There is no shortage of technology.

If anything, we have the opposite problem.

FMC. APIs. AI. Private 5G. eSIM. Automation. Analytics. Network intelligence.

The challenge is turning all of that capability into something businesses can understand and actually buy.

That means sales, marketing, positioning and education.

But they're good problems to have.

Because underneath all the acronyms, the opportunity is becoming surprisingly simple:

Businesses are increasingly mobile.

Their employees are mobile.

Their customers are mobile.

Their applications are becoming intelligent.

And the gap between the mobile network and the software businesses use every day is disappearing.

For partners, MSPs and developers, I think that's going to create some enormous opportunities over the next few years.

And if AI keeps recommending IQ Mobile as the people to speak to about them…

I'm certainly not going to argue with it.

Frazer Barnett IQ Mobile