Picture a telecom operator in 2030. A customer streams a video; an enterprise spins up an AI inference job; a factory floor pulls data from thousands of edge sensors. None of these are unusual. What is different is that every one of those actions now arrives with a number attached: exactly how much energy it consumed, where, and what it would have cost to deliver differently. The network doesn’t just carry out the service. It knows what the service costs the planet, in real time, down to the individual user and request.
That is the future ICT and telecom are heading toward, and it is no longer hypothetical. It’s the world team of experts in the Project EXIGENCE spent the last two years and a half building the foundations for, and is showcased in June 2026, the European Commission’s own SNS JU office stood up and said as much: among every sustainable-6G project in the room, EXIGENCE was the one that had figured out how to make energy and carbon visible at the level that actually matters, the service itself, not just the data center it runs in.
Figure 1 – Routing ICT workflows to wherever the sun is shining
Why the Old Model of "Sustainability" Won't Survive Contact With 6G
For most of the last decade, sustainability in ICT meant annual reporting: measuring the data center, buying renewable credits, publishing the ESG disclosure, repeat. That model worked when digital infrastructure was relatively static. It does not work for what is coming.
AI inference is becoming a constant background load. Edge computing is fragmenting infrastructure across thousands of small sites instead of a handful of large ones. 6G networks are being designed as software-defined, dynamically orchestrated systems where workloads move in real time. In that world, an annual carbon report is like checking your car’s fuel gauge once a year. It tells you almost nothing useful, and by the time you read it, the moment to act on it is long gone.
The organisations that will lead the next decade of ICT are the ones that treat energy and carbon the way they already treat latency and bandwidth: as a live operational signal that shapes decisions every second, not a compliance artifact compiled once a year. That is the shift EXIGENCE was built to enable, and it’s already happening in pieces across the industry, EXIGENCE introduced new cross domain architecture, data flows, processes and a track record.
Three Pictures of the Future, Already Demonstrated
It’s one thing to describe a future state. It’s another way to show it works.
At Hyperconnectivity Center of Detecon Aachen, to vertical industries, and at EuCNC & 6G Summit 2026, EXIGENCE didn’t pitch a vision, it ran live demos, and the underlying research holds numbers that should change how any operator thinks about its next five years.
A network that routes AI work to wherever the sun is shining
EXIGENCE’s expert team built GreenFLag, an AI-driven orchestration framework that shifts distributed AI training to the times and places where renewable energy is available, using live meteorological data rather than averages. Result: a 94.8% cut in grid-energy dependency for federated learning workloads, with no loss in model performance. This is what “carbon-aware AI infrastructure” looks like when it’s not a slogan: a system that makes the placement decision for you, automatically, every time.
A streaming service that incentivises people to consume mindfully
EXIGENCE modeled 1,000 users on a video platform and found that nudging people from 4K toward 1080p, using social recognition and peer ranking rather than discounts, cut traffic by up to 67.2% and captured nearly 90% of the maximum possible emissions savings. The genuinely useful insight for a commercial team: under tight incentive budgets, status and recognition beat cash, nearly doubling adoption and quadrupling the resulting energy savings. This is a loyalty mechanic and a sustainability lever in the same feature.
A core network that finally knows what each user energy costs for it
EXIGENCE built telemetry concept that attributes power consumption down to individual network functions and users across a live RAN and an OpenStack core and discovered that adding more simultaneous users costs the network almost nothing extra in power. Feeding that precision into a reinforcement-learning orchestrator improved power efficiency by 2-5% across a 50-node edge deployment, automatically, without degrading service. That’s the kind of margin improvement that doesn’t require a single new tower.
None of these are lab curiosities. They are previews of standard operating procedures for a 6G-era operator.
The Business Models Project EXIGENCE Opens Up
If energy and carbon become a live, service-level signal instead of an annual footnote, the business model of telecom and ICT changes with it. Three shifts are already visible in what EXIGENCE has proven.
Efficiency becomes a product, not just cost saving
Once an operator can show, precisely, how much energy a given workload placement saved a customer, that capability can be sold, not just used internally. The “low-carbon mode” EXIGENCE demonstrated live, where AI prompts were automatically routed to green-powered GPUs, is a feature an enterprise customer could pay extra for, the same way they pay for guaranteed uptime today.
The SLA gets a new dimension
Today’s service-level agreements are built around latency, throughput, and availability. With service-level ecodata, an operator can offer an SLA that also guarantees a quantified energy or carbon profile, something genuinely auditable, not a marketing claim. For enterprise customers under their own CSRD and ESRS pressure, this turns a telecom contract into part of their compliance answer, which is a far stickier kind of customer relationship than a generic procurement renewal.
Behaviour becomes a resource
The project results point to something telecom hasn’t fully exploited yet: customers will change consumption patterns for recognition, not just rebates, and the network can use that to shave real cost. Combined with EXIGENCE’s incentive-production functions built directly into its orchestration layer, this is a new lever sitting between marketing, network engineering, and finance, one that barely exists as a discipline today.
Why ICT Sector Should Act Now
This isn’t a future that arrives on its own schedule. EXIGENCE’s architecture is already shaping how it gets built: a published ETSI specification on inter-domain energy data exchange, a Green Orchestrator contribution inside ETSI OSM, work inside the IETF GREEN working group on vendor-neutral energy telemetry, and EXIGENCE-originated use cases now sitting inside 3GPP’s 5G-Advanced and 6G study reports, with two EXIGENCE-derived solutions already accepted for the core network.
That means the standards your next generation of network equipment will be built to are being written with this architecture already inside them. Operators who start designing service-level energy visibility now will be integrating with where the industry is going. Those who wait will be retrofitting later, against a moving regulatory deadline (CSRD and ESRS reporting requirements are tightening every cycle) and against competitors who got there first.
What It Means for Business and Planet
If you run network engineering, the workload-placement and orchestration gains are available now, with a proven architecture and a 2-5% power efficiency improvement already demonstrated at scale, not in theory.
If you run product or commercial strategy, the incentive and SLA models above are largely unbuilt in territory industry wide. EXIGENCE has shown the mechanic’s work. Whoever turns them into a product first sets the template others will follow.
If you run sustainability or compliance, the service-level ecodata model is the auditable, granular foundation that CSRD-era reporting will eventually demand from everyone; EXIGENCE got there first and left a usable blueprint.
The future of ICT will not be defined only by faster networks, larger compute, or lower prices. It will be defined by which organizations can show, precisely and in real time, what their digital infrastructure costs and what it’s worth, and EXIGENCE has already mapped out how to build that capability.
Author
Detecon International
Dr. Shivam Gupta at Detecon International manages AI, Data Analytics, and Sustainability, leading their digitainability efforts. With over 10 years’ experience, a PhD in Geoinformatics, and over 20 publications, he advises global entities and delivers data-driven solutions. He co-developed “digitainability” and contributes to data-driven sustainability policies.