Today’s communication service providers (CSPs) are facing an inflection point. With customers demanding more for less, greater competition from traditional and new players, and core services becoming commoditized and causing margin erosion, CSPs are looking to increase their revenue streams by launching new and innovative services and reduce costs while preparing network operations to handle even more data-intensive technologies of the future. Additionally, telecommunications companies need to deliver a differentiated customer experience with faster, easier, more personalized customer support. To do that, many leading CSP are optimizing and automating their IT operations (ITOps) with agentic AI to increase their organizations’ level of maturity in reference to the TM Forum AN (Autonomous Networks) Framework.
5G networks: The first wave of change for telecommunications service delivery
5G networks have revolutionized the telecommunications industry. They have also had an impact on other industries including healthcare, transportation, and manufacturing. Use cases include becoming the backbone for smart traffic systems deployed in major metropolitan areas, enabling robotic automation in manufacturing, and allowing ultra-low–latency implementations like remote surgeries and self-driving rideshare vehicles. 5G networks have also changed how CSPs need to structure their infrastructure to deliver services—from adopting cloud platforms and cloud–native technologies and new, open digital architectures to achieve the economies of scale for bandwidth–intensive use cases and faster, more reliable, redundant, and glitch–free networks.
Customers are demanding more
As telecom providers support new and innovative technologies with 5G networks, customers want a frictionless, personalized experience with zero trouble, zero touch, and zero wait. To keep up, telecoms must deliver more proactive and responsive customer service, including:
Proactive issue resolution: proactively monitor network performance and address potential issues before they impact customers.Accelerate resolution times: when incidents cannot be avoided, or when IT and network configuration changes are necessary, the time required to resolve the incident (mean time to repair, or MTTR) or perform the change should be reduced as much as possible.Faster response times: Reduce wait times for customer support interactions and provide quick resolutions.Clear communication: Inform customers about service disruptions or planned maintenance to build trust.
Autonomous, customer-centric operations are quickly becoming the norm
The speed and methods of customer support have changed. Calling into a service center and speaking to a human (who probably needs to work with another team to resolve the issue) takes too long and is longer acceptable. Instead, today’s telecom customers expect:
Self-service options: Online tools, mobile applications, and self-serve kiosks that allow independent account management and resolution of common issues.Chatbots and AI-powered assistants: AI-powered chatbots using natural language that can handle routine inquiries and provide instant support 24x7x365.Support across multiple channels: Multi-platform support options that include email for non-urgent issues, social media direct messages, and even traditional telephone support for customer who still want a human to help them.
The future of telecommunications operations is agentic AI
Instead of inefficient, manual processes that involve form completes and emails, agentic AI can meet ITOps end users and customers where they are, delivering a single, integrated hub for all requests, and allowing engagement through platforms they’re already familiar with, like Teams, Slack, or social media channels.
For IT and network operations center (NOC) staff stuck in a “swivel chair” rut maneuvering through time-consuming, multi-system processes, agentic AI offers smart, agent-like assistants that free up staff to focus on critical, high-value tasks instead of repetitive actions.
In many current environments, collaboration is impeded by silos, with systems of record disconnected from communication channels. Agentic AI can break down these barriers by integrating systems of record with communication tools. This creates a collaborative, adaptive environment where information flows smoothly.
Another issue that could be impeding efficiency is the restriction of data analysis to a few individuals, with insights detached from IT and network operations staff, who need to wait in line to get important insights. Agentic AI democratizes data access, enabling team members to ask questions, create dashboards, and explore complex queries.
Conclusion.
Agentic AI is ushering in a new era of automation for CSPs and building the vision of self-healing networks that can detect faults or degradations and automatically reroute traffic or initiate repairs, and trigger predictive maintenance by analyzing historical and current data[SC1] . Agentic AI is helping manage and automate the risk assessment of IT changes that helps CSPs keep up with rapid technology rollouts such as cloud services and 5G without compromising network stability. Agentic AI is enabling a sharper customer focus by automatically correlating infrastructure incidents with affected services, allowing prioritization of issues with the greatest customer impact. Additionally, agentic AI will help CSPs manage customer relationships autonomously — suggesting plans, resolving service issues, and troubleshooting devices without human agents – moving CSPs beyond connectivity into becoming intelligent service platforms.
(Image source TM Forum, 2024)