Viewpoints

The question is no longer simply who has the best network. It is who can make the best use of it.

By George Glass, CTO, TM Forum

For much of telecom’s history, operators competed by building better networks. Coverage, capacity and performance determined market leadership. Those measures still matter, but they are becoming less effective as differentiators. As networks mature, operators face a different challenge: how to turn infrastructure advantage into stronger customer outcomes, improved efficiency, and sustainable growth.

The next stage of competition will be shaped less by infrastructure and more by an operator’s ability to improve customer experience, reduce operating costs, and bring new services to market faster. Success will increasingly depend on how effectively they combine network, IT, and business operations into a more intelligent operating model.

The next decade is likely to reward operators that can combine network intelligence, AI, and automation to operate more effectively and respond more quickly to changing market demands. The question is no longer simply who has the best network. It is who can make the best use of it.

The autonomy opportunity

This is where autonomous networks become strategically important. Much of the industry discussion focuses on automation itself, but the real significance lies in the operating model it enables.

A network capable of detecting service degradation before customers experience it can improve customer satisfaction while reducing support costs. One that can diagnose and resolve faults automatically can improve resilience while freeing operational teams to focus on higher-value activities. Dynamic resource allocation can improve efficiency without compromising service quality.

These capabilities are increasingly becoming practical realities rather than long-term ambitions. Operators around the world are deploying AI-driven assurance, closed-loop automation, and intelligent operations across different parts of their businesses. The broader opportunity lies in building organizations that operate with greater speed, consistency and intelligence.

Autonomous networks are therefore not an end in themselves. They are an important step toward a broader vision: the autonomous enterprise. In that model, business intent can be translated into coordinated action across network, IT, and customer operations, creating organizations that can adapt and respond in near real time. That shift has implications far beyond the network organization alone.

The North America advantage

North America enters this transition with significant strengths. If autonomy becomes one of the defining competitive factors of the next decade, the region starts from a position many markets would envy. Many of the platforms, cloud environments, and AI capabilities shaping the next wave of enterprise technology are being developed and scaled in North America.

Unlike previous technology cycles, operators are not building from scratch. They are starting with mature networks, access to leading AI ecosystems, and extensive experience managing large-scale digital infrastructure.

The challenge is converting those advantages into measurable business outcomes. Across the industry, the conversation is moving beyond pilot projects and proofs of concept. The focus is increasingly on how operators can deploy AI at scale, embed automation into day-to-day operations, and create governance frameworks that allow autonomy to grow with confidence. The organizations that solve those challenges first are likely to establish advantages that become increasingly difficult for competitors to replicate.

The legacy challenge

One of the biggest obstacles to progress lies outside the network: organizational complexity.

Many North American operators have grown through mergers, acquisitions, and decades of technology evolution. While those strategies created scale and market strength, they also left behind fragmented technology estates. Behind a single brand may sit multiple billing systems, overlapping customer platforms, duplicated processes, and disconnected data environments.

That complexity slows decision-making and makes automation harder to scale. Autonomous operations depend on trusted data, interoperable systems, and the ability to orchestrate activity across multiple domains. When those foundations are fragmented, the benefits of AI become more difficult to realize consistently across the business.

This is why autonomous networks cannot be viewed solely as a network initiative. The transition to autonomy requires modern, composable IT capabilities that can support real-time decision-making across the enterprise. Operators are increasingly discovering that network modernization and IT modernization must progress together if they are to unlock the full value of either. The challenge is that autonomy cannot be switched on overnight. The foundations, from trusted data and modern IT architecture to governance and skills, take years to build.

The collaboration imperative

Industry collaboration has long helped accelerate innovation, improve interoperability, and reduce unnecessary complexity. The move toward autonomy is no exception.

Autonomous operations cannot scale in isolation. Operators face many of the same challenges when integrating AI, modernizing legacy systems, and orchestrating activity across network and IT domains. Common frameworks and standards can help reduce complexity and accelerate progress, allowing operators to focus resources on the experiences and services that differentiate them.

The leadership question

At TM Forum, we describe this industry transition as the race to 2030: the journey toward more autonomous, AI-native, and composable operating models across telecom. But regardless of terminology, the underlying challenge is clear. Operators must determine how they turn technology investment into sustained growth, resilience, and customer value.

North America has many of the assets required to lead this transition. The greater risk is assuming those advantages will be enough. Across telecom, the basis of competition is shifting from building networks to operating them more intelligently. The next leaders will not be determined by who invests most heavily in infrastructure, but by who translates infrastructure strength into better operating performance, market agility, and customer outcomes fastest. Operators that continue to focus primarily on infrastructure investment may discover that competitors have already moved the competitive frontier elsewhere.

The industry’s next leaders will not emerge because they built the most infrastructure. They will emerge because they learned how to operate that infrastructure with greater intelligence, speed, and adaptability than their competitors. North America has the assets to lead. The question is whether operators can translate those advantages into autonomous, AI-enabled operating models before today’s strengths become tomorrow’s legacy.

George is an experienced industry thought leader, telecoms professional, and business manager with over 32 years expertise in the IT sector in all aspects of software engineering. After joining the TM Forum in 2018, he became CTO in 2020. Through industry collaboration, he’s leading the creation of industry standard architectural and business transformation patterns, Open APIs, AI enabled operational models, self-healing autonomous network services and data models that enable digital service providers to simplify the transformation of their IT and network estate, helping to drive the digital revolution that is happening across all industries today.

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