Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Operators today are navigating unprecedented complexity—rising costs, accelerating customer expectations, and increasingly dynamic networks. In this recent video interview, my colleague Kevin Wade and I explore why AI‑driven automation has shifted from a “nice‑to‑have” technology to a core business requirement for telecom operators and beyond.

For decades, telecom network operations have depended on traditional OSS tools – complex, services-heavy platforms that take years to modernize and even longer to deliver measurable business impact. This year at MWC, the leading OSS vendors showcased a variety of new AI extensions for their portfolios and marketed them as the fastest path to autonomous network operations. They are not.

While the race to expand networking infrastructure to support AI applications continues on land, the same expansion is occurring undersea. Subsea cables spanning Earth’s oceans must evolve to keep pace.

As digital transformation accelerates, the underlying infrastructure supporting your enterprise or service provider network faces unprecedented pressure. The exponential growth of data, driven by cloud computing, 5G, and particularly Artificial Intelligence (AI), demands a fundamental rethink of how you approach connectivity.

In the telecom industry, leaders are under pressure to deliver more—more capacity, more agility, more reliability—while managing rising complexity with fewer resources. The network is the circulatory system of the modern telco, yet it’s still often operated like a patchwork of manual roads, each requiring constant human intervention. This model worked when traffic was predictable and growth was linear.

Imagine pulling up to a gas pump, inserting your credit card, and having the display on the pump say “denied”. You call your credit card company, and they say, “Oh, we don’t know, maybe it’s the merchant’s fault, or the card reader is bad…, we can look into it and get back to you in a few weeks.” Most of us would be pretty upset with that response.