BT Group has announced the launch of a dedicated standalone international business unit.

The UK telco giant confirmed yesterday (June 3) that the unit will be called BT International.

BT’s announcement comes weeks after reports suggested the telco was plotting to create a standalone international unit.

The Financial Times report last month noted that an internal memo was sent to staff stating that BT’s decision to carve out its international unit as a standalone business gives the company “the best chance of success” in both markets at home and abroad.

The division is estimated to be made up of more than 8,000 staff.

Bas Berger, previously head of BT’s international activities within BT Business, will lead the unit as CEO.

“It comes as our customers face unprecedented disruption across their markets driven by geopolitics, regulation, and technology — with AI catalyzing change faster than ever,” said Berger.

“We have designed BT International specifically to help our customers meet these challenges head-on and anticipate future opportunities to thrive.”

BT’s International unit will focus heavily on AI and cloud opportunities, including the company’s Global Fabric, an AI-ready, cloud-centric network-as-a-service (NaaS) platform. Global Fabric launched to live traffic earlier this year.

In the blog post, Berger also made reference to BT becoming “asset light,” a nod to the company’s strategy to redesign its network in recent years to deal with the changing demands of customer traffic.

“We see that AI has unpredictable impacts on our customers’ networks — from the lumpy, bulky training workloads of large language models (LLMs) powering GenAI to the low latency demands of conversational AI and augmented reality,” he added.

The company’s push to create a standalone unit is no surprise. BT CEO Allison Kirkby has set out to focus on BT’s domestic telecoms and broadband opportunities, as the business looks to streamline. In April, the company agreed to sell its Italian unit to Retelit.

Kirkby outlined plans last year to save a further £3 billion ($3.98bn) in costs by the end of 2029.

Part of her turnaround strategy has been to focus heavily on the company’s home market in the UK.

In 2023, BT announced plans to cut 55,000 jobs by the end of the decade, affecting its operations both in the UK and globally. This is set to reduce headcount at the company to 75,000 by 2030 from 130,000.

Earlier this year, the company agreed a deal to sell its Irish wholesale and enterprise unit to Cordiant subsidiary Speed Fibre Group.

Just before Christmas, Equinix agreed to acquire BT Group’s Irish data center business for €59 million ($67.3m), a deal expected to be completed during the first half of this year.