“If you think you’re in the connectivity business in 2026 as an operator, you’ve lost 50% of your addressable market already.”
Prianca Ravichander, CMO of Tecnotree, was asked earlier this year where the next trillion dollars in telecoms was going to come from. Now she thinks she has an answer.
Where does the next wave of telecom value come from? It plainly can’t come from making more consumers, and competing head-on with AI companies at their own game is difficult at best.
Instead, Ravichander points to orchestration; specifically, from operators competing on their ability to coordinate customer experience across a data set nobody else in the AI value chain has access to.
“We compete for the right to orchestrate in a multi-vendor ecosystem,” she points out.
“Now operators are going to need to learn how to do that as well when they move into the partner ecosystem. They’re going to have to fight for the right to orchestrate across the partners.”
Key Change
While this sounds like a major shift, there is low-hanging fruit. Step one would be to reframe how telecoms players assign value away from simple reliability or speeds and towards creating useful outcomes for people. If sheer connectivity has a limited place in the budget, finding points of value especially for business customers – and then monetising them – is the way forward. Ravichander gave an example from her own experience:
“The internet went down and then I’m like talking to an AI agent at two in the morning, because I need to do something for work at that point in time. It cannot wait at all. And an AI agent is then going back, trying to reboot my system from God knows where, right, and telling me that a fuse has tripped, and that I need to turn off and on the router so it can reset something in this box in my home. How do they provide that synergy at that moment? That’s huge customer value, huge. I’d pay for that, but it was completely free.”
While nobody suggests charging a consumer at that moment is necessarily a good idea, it is an example of where services are creating value, as opposed to being a cost. Mapping out moments of value like this for businesses can open up a myriad of opportunities to parlay understanding of events into business models.
Unsurprisingly for Tecnotree, this step does tie into their areas of expertise… but this will be the last time the conversation is predictable.
“Primarily you want to get into event driven charging systems, to consolidate that intelligence orchestration and to make it like a commercial engine for driving outcomes… It has to be enterprise, but wholesale is booming as well.”
Wholesalers getting in on the opportunity is perhaps counterintuitive, but there is a logic which again comes down to the question of orchestration.
“So again, B2B2X is something you’ve heard for 10 years now easily, but now it means something totally different. It means that when I create an action on B, I should be able to see it on X; or when X creates an action, it should go back all the way to B, so the parties’ interaction is all connected. It’s not a hierarchical partner ecosystem that is somehow connected via forms or a catalogue, it’s completely orchestration driven. Add AI on top of these use cases and journeys in terms of wholesale – well, it’s a painting that has not even started to be painted yet.”
So, let’s grant the idea that event-based value is the way forward, what would that look like?
“You look at Walgreens or any mature market, they have about 50 real-time events that provide the context in what you might call the experience layer – what grabs the attention, what makes it uniquely you.
“And then we realised that the network itself is throwing up an equal amount of about 50 events per subscriber… And when you bring those things together, then you have a next best action model that’s able to predict what is going to be the most relevant.”
Operators are sitting on an untapped opportunity, “a blue-green ocean… because nobody has access to their data.”
Reading From the Same Score
Getting there, in Ravichander’s account, needs a change to operational and billing processes and systems rather than in the network. “Commercial orchestration is not happening on the network. It’s happening within your commercial systems,” she points out.
As a result, Ravichander proposes that data orchestration and data models should not be based in the network if we’re to build the right outcomes, they should be based in the BSS instead.
“We’re expanding, we’re forced to expand more into this BSS-led data and AI transformation that telcos are looking for,” she noted.
In Tecnotree’s case this means leveraging their acquisition of Cognitive Scale (“They were mainly data orchestration for CVS Health and some of the Fortune 5 companies in the US.”)
“We took that and we customised it for our full stack data model all the way into the network. We included other types of network events as well, and we’re expanding more now – location-based services, certain OSS and deep network events as well. We created a full stack data model and data orchestration layer, embedded it into the BSS and added this real-time event-driven capability that allows for telco-grade, you know, transactions to happen inbound as well as outbound.”
So… that’s an interesting take on how to build the data orchestration and there are certainly precedents which might support her argument. For example, a decade or so ago the telcos missed out on leveraging location-based data commercially for two reasons – being cautious about data privacy and having problems connecting the intelligence to a charging model. But, while Ravichander’s approach might be able to solve the charging problem, bizarrely it might also solve governance problems too.
Passing the Baton
And so we turn counter-intuitively to the world of accounting. New financial accounting rules under the IFRS regime impose some painful challenges for the CFO. IFRS 15 and IFRS 18 rules updates coming into force this year are demanding:
“Now you need to factor in how much governance, how much AI, how much digital service, and how much human effort is also embedded into selling a GB of data.”
That’s all very well, but there’s no clear or obvious link between BSS-led data orchestration and this accounting problem. Two things bridge that gap; firstly, trying to address the challenge of governance and assurance of that data orchestration layer itself; and second, thinking about tokens as a possible currency of charging in a future, more AI-oriented environment.
“When we started talking about charging based on tokens, or selling services based on tokens, in the context of IFRS 15 everybody just woke up, it just clicked in their mind.”
Put simply, by building the commercial orchestration stack around the BSS, for both tokens and other services, it makes it much more easy to trace the costs and inputs related to what is going through the system – that’s what the BSS does, after all.
As a result, CFOs have suddenly become much more intensely interested in the idea of BSS-led data orchestration.
However, it also makes any partnership ecosystems much more transparent, opening up options for how to partner or do business with third parties beyond simply time-based or capacity-based charging. It’s not all an operator would need, but it certainly opens up a route to a different kind of business:
“You’ve got a set of partners; you’ve got the orchestration across these partners; you’ve got the right to orchestrate and expand horizontally and vertically; and then you’re able to provide synergy with your own data as a value at the last mile. For me that’s the structure for reaching that trillion dollars.”
