It’s six years after we were touched by the spirit of humility at TM Forum’s annual event as we sought out verticals in a bid for 5G relevance, and three years since TM Forum’s Nik Willets told the industry that we were at a Code Red moment. And only two years since the vibes said we were moving to the cloud and becoming platform businesses.
Things change. Some of those delivering those messages aren’t here any longer. Both BT speakers that outlined that operator’s AI strategy three years ago have left the company. Replacing them are the new pragmatists, appealing to BT’s past and, in some eyes, relegating EE to a sub-brand. And the man that crossed the stage in 2019 wearing the DT badge is now leading BT’s digital unit.
Yet other things stay the same. Nik Willets, the seemingly un-againg CEO of the TM Forum, is still here.
Issuer of the famous code red warning in 2023, Willets reminded the 2026 audience that we are still at that code red. Not only that, we are now in a Race to 2030. That’s a three year time frame for there to be winners and losers from the AI economy.
Is he positive about this race? You better believe it. “I’m more convinced than ever that AI is a game changer: not just bolted on but integrated to unlock radical efficiency and drive new growth,” he said.
AI could enable telcos to shift from best effort connectivity to guaranteed outcomes. “If we can write guarantees into contracts, that is the prize.”
And Willets said we could also exploit AI to use networks to sense world around us. Crucially, telcos could be trusted and efficient partners in the AI economy. “Trustworthiness now the number one brand value for telcos.” It is reliability and assurance that will drive this. Operations will be run on autonomous flows, with Layer Five autonomy (it’s a TM Forum thing) spanning end-to-end and determined by customer outcome.
But it’s not all motherhood and AI pie. There are challenges ahead, Willets said. The industry must avoid giving up control of tech stacks that they have spent 5-10 years getting back under their wings. And control will be key. When an agent does something who says it was OK to do that?
Old systems of compliance have no relevance in this world, he warned.
Suicidal urges and regulatory unfairness
So how did the telco CEO panel react to this vision and challenge? Shall we say – mixed? It started uncontroversially enough.
Claire Gillies, BT’s Consumer CEO, picked up the trust baton. She said that the company’s role in the AI world is “to understand, protect and anticipate customer needs, move from being a connectivity provider to a trusted digital guardian that can help customers thrive in this new digital world.”
She also offered ways in which AI could boost the consumer experience, from agents in call centres to driving in-home self-healing networks, and providing scam protection. They were good solid examples but perhaps not things to set hearts racing.
But that’s the story: “The customer value is around trust. Differentiation [from other tech providers] is key and that is about creating long term trusted customer relationships.”
Axiata’s former CEO and now board advisor Vivek Sood worked his way through a deck that offered more detail on the company’s AI journey. Axiata has spent two years building out 50 classical AI use cases and 20 deploying Gen AI ones. The operator has therefore done a “decent job” in making its networks more efficient and making better use of spectrum.
But the benefits have been limited because these classify as “pockets of AI”. “They have not given us scale,” Sood said. 2026 will be about moving from use cases to “end-to-end domain transformation.”
“The next step is how we take this to consumers and monetise it.” That’s because the real value of AI to Axiata is in being able to drive customer growth. Cost optimisation is fine but its IT spend is only at 2-3% of Capex, it’s not as if there are huge savings there. “This is really about value for customers,” he said.
Picking up this baton was TIM CEO Pietro Labriola who said that he is trying to move the business from being about connectivity to providing “trusted digital infrastructure” and also shaping up as a “trust ecosystem”.
That includes sovereignty, which provides value because it provides control – customers know where data is stored, which jurisdiction has control, and who has access.
“This is the role the telco can play. In Italy, TIM owns 17 data centres, 8 of which are tier four. We own the widest backbone. We own a cyber security company. As a telco, we can be the trusted player in this new [AI] empire.”
And he stressed that sovereignty wasn’t just about putting up barriers and keeping others out. “Sovereignty is not isolation,” he said. “It means taking control of our data.”
Off we go
But put enough telcos in a room for long enough and the fear and self-criticism will come through.
Pushed on the potential upside for telcos from the AI economy, TIM’s Labriola said, “The truth is in Europe it is very difficult to innovate. We paid billions for 5G licences to create the ability to differentiate QoS but it is against net neutrality. Everyone makes WhatsApp calls so explain to me why I need to give the customer 24/7 in-person support and I must provide legal interception, but WhatsApp doesn’t. Why can Instagram apply a different GDPR to a telco? What jurisdiction is Starlink under?”
“Sometimes people say telcos are stupid not to innovate, but it’s not easy.”
Then we had Manjot Singh Mann, CEO Connectivity, Keppel, who made it dark.
“We are very suicidal in nature. We love to price ourselves down and call it creativity. But the reality is we are dying of a thousand cuts as we see in shareholder returns in most telecoms.
“But I’m very hopeful that AI can in some way change the model,” he offered, turning on a pencil thin ray of light.
What might that light look like? Well for Singh Mann it’s about getting technology out of the hands of technologists. “Technology left in the hands of technologists is bound to fail. It has to move to business ownership – that is more important than technology itself.”
Willets shuffled the cards. Asked for what he needs from this audience, Labriola was reaching for the downer button again.
“When you talk with a company like mine this is a tough job because our company is not ready. We are used to carrying on business in the same way. Sometimes embracing AI means changing the mindset. We are acting on this challenge today in TIM because without a top-down tough approach nothing will happen. People are against innovation because it means coming out from their comfort zone. So we need to change that way of thinking: if we just try just to impose then nothing will happen.”
BT’s Gillies was on board with this.
“The industry is built on resilience, certainty, prices. Not this moment of change. Institutions that can solve a problem for you are often the people standing in the way of finding a solution. They are employed to do something in a certain way and these are the people we are asking to disrupt themselves. It has to start with culture and we need to break some things that have been institutions for a long time.”
Could it be that Willets was, in fact, in danger of ageing after all – and that his panel discussion not quite going in the intended direction? We had moved on from the positivity at the start, and the potential for AI to transform our fortunes. The Race to 2030 began to look like a tough one.
Elsewhere however, there were signs of real progress, on the show floor and in the smaller conference sessions. More of that to come.
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