The 10 Transformation Journeys
to the Intelligent Telco

By: Martin Creaner

Digital transformation has been burrowing its way into the very heart of the telecoms industry for at least the last decade – probably much longer. Over this time, the 10 Transformation Journeys Framework has proven helpful to many companies trying to better understand the full scope of digital transformation. Its main strength has always been its insistence on thinking broadly about digital transformation, on taking a holistic view of the challenges to fundamentally transform to a digital telco.

But the 10 journeys never really accounted for the emergence of AI and its impact on every industry globally.  AI has been the veritable 'rock thrown into the pond' of digital transformation, and the ripples are changing every aspect of how the telco transforms.  AI not only changes how the telco will operate, but it also creates a once-in-a-generation opportunity to change how the telco is positioned in the global digital economy.  The emergence of this new Intelligent Telco has some key characteristics:

1. The Intelligent Telco positions itself as a balanced communications, cloud, and AI player. While the telco has looked to establish relevance beyond communications for many years, AI creates an additional imperative for a telco. The next generation of AI-enabled services - ranging from AR to consumer/enterprise robotics - requires ultra-high reliability, low-latency infrastructure that offers enhanced uplink reliability in addition to downlink excellence. The telco that can offer the required connectivity experience in speed, latency, and reliability, linked to edge cloud AI, can position itself as a gatekeeper for the provision of such important new services.
2. The Intelligent Telco will be at the forefront of embracing the emerging Agentic Economy - both in how it runs its business, and as the trusted, sovereign provider of Agents in an increasingly untrustworthy world. It prepares itself for a world where the majority of its customer engagement will be agent to agent, rather than human to human, and where its business models become an order of magnitude more flexible, engagement-focused, demand-driven, and context-sensitive.
3. The Intelligent Telco recognizes that the future workforce will be made up of a blend of real employees and digital employees. Finding the correct balance between the tasks that only humans can do, the tasks where human effectiveness is enhanced by intelligent co-pilots, and the tasks that Agents can best do on their own, is a critical learning exercise for the Intelligent Telco.

This results in a new 10 Transformation Journeys - driven by the impact of AI - to transform a digital telco into the Intelligent Telco. 

Journey #1:  Multi-technology, autonomously managed, communications, cloud and AI infrastructure: A few years ago, the main challenge for the telco was to work out how best to become a cloudified telco as a mechanism to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and better prepare them for the service demands of the future.  By and large, this has been achieved in the core and management systems of the telco industries, while progress in the RAN has been much slower.  The growing sophistication of AI has also allowed the telco to begin to move towards more autonomously managed networks – staffed in part by digital employees.

But this journey is also about beginning once again to invest in the Telco Cloud opportunity.  The concept of the telco having a serious role to play in cloud provision seemed impossible 5 years ago due to the overwhelming power of the hyperscalers.  But thanks to deglobalisation and a breakdown in global trust, telcos have now been gifted the opportunity to once again compete as Sovereign Cloud & AI providers.  Telcos now need to work out how quickly and strongly they go after this opportunity.

A final aspect of this journey for every telco has little to do with AI, but rather with the inexorable rise of LEO satellite offerings.  The telco needs to develop a strategy for LEO that will ultimately be integrated from a technical, geopolitical, and business model perspective into their existing terrestrial offerings.