AI-native telco: Turning vision into scalable business value

The telecommunications industry is under growing pressure to deliver more. For many telco leaders, the pressures are compounded by flattening revenue streams, legacy environments, rising cost bases and the need to modernize while maintaining service resilience. At the same time, advances in artificial intelligence (AI), 5G, and cloud are creating new opportunities to reinvent business models, unlock new revenue streams, and deliver hyper-personalized customer experiences.

According to TM Forum, over 60% of communication service providers (CSPs) have an AI-native vision, although more than a third still lack a clear execution roadmap. In this blog, we explore what it truly takes to become an AI-native telco—one where AI is deeply embedded in everyday decisions, workflows, and operations. It outlines the critical enablers required for telcos to make this shift to sustain growth, improve efficiency, and remain relevant in a rapidly evolving market.

AI as a growth engine for telcos

Insights from our recent analysis of the 2025 Voice of Our Clients indicate that AI adoption among telcos is maturing, with organizations moving from isolated pilots to scaled deployments. Nearly 66% of them are applying GenAI to improve production and operations.

High-impact use cases delivering tangible impact are emerging across the telecom value chain:

• Autonomous networks are delivering measurable gains by improving resilience, reducing operational costs and accelerating service launches. Networks that can self-configure, self-optimize, and self-heal are enabling faster service launches, seamless scaling and consistent customer experience, even under unpredictable demand.
• AI in Customer experience is anticipating customer needs, personalizing offerings, and strengthening loyalty.
• Intelligent automation is streamlining back-office and field operations, reducing costs and accelerating time-to-market.
• AI-based spend analytics are improving transparency and control across procurement and operational expenditure.
• AI-enabled fraud detection and security are monitoring anomalies in real-time, protecting both the business and customers.

Beyond internal efficiency, forward-thinking operators are using AI to design new B2B opportunities. By exposing network APIs and combining them with AI, telcos can enable innovation across IoT, edge computing, and ultra-low latency applications—turning the network into a growth platform.

As the industry evolves from isolated generative AI pilots to agentic AI systems capable of autonomous decision-making, platforms such as CGI SmartNetra help accelerate this transition through a vendor-agnostic, TM Forum aligned architecture that leverages digital twins, AI-driven self-monitoring and corrective automation. By providing end-to-end visibility, scenario simulation and interoperable integration across multi-vendor environments, telcos can move towards Level 4 and Level 5 autonomy while turning the network into a scalable, interoperable growth platform.

Scaling AI beyond pilots

Despite the momentum, many telcos struggle to scale their AI initiatives. Telcos that have successfully leveraged AI focus on:

• Redesigning operating models around AI by embedding automation across end-to-end workflows rather than experimenting with standalone GenAI use cases. They embed AI across customer, network, and IT operations to enable repeatability, autonomy, and scale supported by future-ready talent and an AI-first mindset.
• Industrializing AI through shared platforms, data, and governance. Shared AI enablement layers—covering model access, tools, observability, and guardrails—are essential for the safe and consistent reuse of AI across the enterprise.
• Tying AI to business outcomes. AI scales when tied to measurable impact. Sustainable value is unlocked when telcos focus on EBITDA contribution, faster time-to-market, and improvements in customer experience, rather than experimentation alone.

CGI has been the partner of choice, helping multiple clients across industry domains scale enterprise AI to accelerate outcomes.

Global Capability Centers (GCCs) as AI innovation hubs

GCCs are evolving from cost-focused centers into strategic innovation engines that help telcos experiment, co-create, and scale AI more efficiently.

GCCs can help organizations gain a competitive advantage by establishing center of excellence, building accelerators and reusable AI assets, partnering with academia and startups, and setting up operational efficiencies that scale.

In one CGI engagement with a Canadian Telco, a well-structured GCC helped consolidate fragmented systems, regain control of infrastructure, and accelerate innovation while reducing costs. As AI adoption accelerates, GCCs are becoming indispensable hubs for innovation and value creation.

From AI-enabled to AI-native: What comes next

Becoming an AI-native telco requires more than deploying new tools. It demands a deliberate , pragmatic and staged shift in how networks are designed, operations are run and decisions are made. Telcos need to focus on foundations first, then scale autonomy where it delivers measurable value.

The essential steps include:

1. Make AI part of everyday decision-making: Move AI from the margins to the mainstream. This translates to using AI to inform network planning, investment prioritization, service design and customer engagement, so insights are acted on continuously, not reviewed periodically.
2. Shift from use cases to capabilities: Invest in cloud-native platforms, data lakes with real-time ingestions, digital twins, and shared AI enablement layers such as agentic fabric to orchestrate capabilities and use strong governance to ensure AI can be reused safely across the enterprise.
3. Design for autonomy with accountability: Autonomy does not remove people from the equation. Successful telcos embrace responsible AI, defining guardrails and a robust risk matrix to ensure humans remain accountable as AI takes on greater operational responsibilities.
4. Monetize intelligence, not just connectivity: AI-native telcos look beyond efficiency gains and focus on monetizing their intelligence. By exposing insights, predictions and controls through APIs, they enable partners and enterprises to build new services—extending the telco’s role in digital ecosystems.

The Telco Next vision

For decades, CGI has worked with telecom operators in North America, the UK and Europe as they evolve from traditional telcos into technology-driven businesses. From scaling GCCs and enabling agile operating models to industrializing AI and advancing autonomous networks, we help telcos translate their AI ambitions into measurable outcomes.

This perspective also shapes CGI’s Telco Next vision—an event that brings together telco leaders, GCC executives, ecosystem partners, and industry analysts to explore how AI-native capabilities can translate into real-world outcomes.

For telco leaders, the next phase is about decisive action, embedding AI at scale to drive growth, differentiation and resilience.

Connect with me to explore how we can support your journey toward AI-native telco operations.