The pace of change continues to accelerate, and the ecosystem surrounding our telecom industry thrives on tackling innovation through open collaboration. With ongoing operational and economic challenges to stay competitive, service providers are taking a measured and deliberate path forward, with a focus on business benefits, while constantly adapting to ongoing changes like AI and 6G.
Many service providers are also tackling the transformation of their customer and business processes to evolve from telcos to digital tech companies. In the coming year, service providers will continue to focus on a number of key themes, as follows.
Driving expansion and commercial success of 5G
Next-generation 5G continues being deployed globally, with a greater focus on identifying successful business models as well as coverage expansion. While competition to lead the industry remains fiercer than ever, commercial success has been somewhat slower than expected. To fully unlock the potential of 5G, we will see a renewed focus on fresh operational methodologies, innovative business opportunities, and new partnerships.
Using AI to improve business and resource efficiency
AI has already made significant strides over the past few years, and in 2025, this momentum will continue with tremendous speed and have more impact on how we live, especially in telecommunications.
AI is well suited to the distributed nature of telco networks, enabling automation of lifecycle management and providing insights across every segment of technology, every device and service. AI is poised to accelerate the offering of innovative new experiences while improving business and resource efficiency.
While some companies may achieve substantial annual gains enabled by AI, leaders should identify a realistic goal for increasing productivity and operational efficiency through AI and implement it across their business accordingly.
Service providers have the opportunity to control their destiny. If they are truly willing to disrupt themselves, break away in their market, and embrace AI, they will survive this transition. Now is the time to focus on disruption and speed.
Harnessing observability to enable autonomous infrastructure
Observability enables a data-driven approach to automating the infrastructure across hardware, software, and cloud deployments. Data is the new differentiator to the value of service provider futures. Combining predictive analytics, generative AI (gen AI), and open APIs enables service providers to talk to their data to provide insights and operational recommendations with closed-loop automation.
Over the past years, service providers have been applying AI to their core mobile and wireline networks. They will look at ways to deploy AI in RAN to dynamically manage frequencies, sectors, and base stations, improving efficiency, power consumption, and performance metrics. Similarly, gen AI and AIOps are enabling predictive maintenance, root-cause analysis, and smarter decision-making with guardrails for privacy and compliance.
Laying the foundations for 6G
Service providers are taking a more pragmatic approach to the next generation of mobile architecture (6G), focusing on improving business outcomes. Defining 6G involves more than just infrastructure—it requires the participation of a broader ecosystem of industry players, demanding structural and cultural shifts across the value chain. This collaborative approach will be key to driving innovation and ensuring the technology meets the demands of the future.
The growing telco industry ecosystem will focus over the next year on the following:
- What key aspects of 6G differentiate from 5G’s capabilities
- Distributed architectures with AI driven autonomous infrastructure
- Fostering new collaboration behaviours to accelerate transformation
- Open APIs to streamline multi-system interactions and offer new services
- Horizontal platforms to mitigate risk and improve operational consistency
- Evolution of network slicing with AI inference to enable intelligent connectivity
- Holistic sustainability as a core driver of next-gen networks
- Integrating all photonic and non-terrestrial network (NTN) technologies
- Exploring new use cases:
- Immersive AR/VR/XR experiences
- Precision positioning
- Advanced autonomous vehicle (V2X)
- Integrated sensing – situational awareness
- Energy efficient IoT integration
Open source will play a pivotal role in addressing innovation, flexibility, unpredictability, and independence in this rapidly evolving space. The road to 6G will focus on harnessing AI and automation to unlock new data-driven services and meet ambitious sustainability goals.
In our increasingly disruptive world, the journey will require pragmatic, deliberate, and constant evolution to differentiate and stand out from the crowd while ensuring business value is delivered across industries and geographies.
