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In an interview with TM Forum, Prianca Ravichander, Chief Commercial Officer and Chief Marketing Officer at Tecnotree, discusses why AI is creating the biggest business model shift in telecoms since mobile broadband and how operators can evolve from connectivity providers into intelligence platforms for the AI economy.
Prianca Ravichander, Tecnotree
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The AI gold rush is here: will telecoms lead it, or power it for everyone else?
Tecnotree’s Prianca Ravichander explores how AI, trusted automation, wholesale monetization, sovereign infrastructure and autonomous revenue are redefining telecom growth as operators race to capture a larger share of the AI economy.
PR: Fast Forwarding to the Future is really about acknowledging that the future has stopped waiting for our planning cycles.
For years, operators planned in quarters. AI is operating in minutes.
The telecom industry is approaching one of the most significant inflection points in its history. For three decades, operators built the infrastructure that powered the digital economy, yet much of the value created by cloud, platforms and digital services accrued elsewhere. We built the roads, but others built the destinations.
Today, AI is changing the economics of the entire technology stack. AI is hungry for three things: compute, data and connectivity. Telecom operators happen to sit at the intersection of all three. That creates a once-in-a-generation opportunity to move beyond connectivity and participate directly in the value creation layers of intelligence.
The first internet wave made telecom operators the road. The AI wave can make them the control tower.
At Tecnotree, we believe the next-generation operator must evolve from a connectivity provider into an intelligence platform. That means moving beyond traditional models built around products and transactions towards AI-native models built around prediction, personalization, automation and ecosystem monetization.
The operators that win the next decade will not necessarily have the largest networks. They will have the fastest intelligence loops—the ability to convert data into intelligence, intelligence into experiences and experiences into revenue.
In the AI economy, the future is no longer something operators prepare for. It’s becoming something they need to monetize.
PR: Everyone is talking about AI. Very few are talking about trust.
The industry doesn’t have an intelligence problem. It has an accountability problem.
AI is already influencing customer journeys, automating operational decisions, optimizing networks and shaping revenue outcomes. The challenge is no longer whether AI works. The challenge is whether organizations are prepared to trust AI with decisions that affect millions of customers and billions of dollars in revenue.
Everyone wants autonomous AI until the AI autonomously approves something expensive.
That is why trust is becoming the operating system of AI. Explainability, governance, observability and accountability are no longer technical discussions. They are boardroom discussions.
This is also why we are seeing increasing momentum around MODaaS—Model, Operations and Data as a Service. As organizations deploy hundreds or thousands of AI models, agents and decision engines, governance becomes exponentially more complex. The future challenge isn’t deploying AI. It’s orchestrating, governing and monetizing AI at scale.
At Tecnotree, we see MODaaS as one of the foundational building blocks for autonomous businesses. It provides the trust, transparency and operational governance layer required for AI agents to operate responsibly across customers, ecosystems and enterprise processes.
AI without governance creates risk. Governance without AI creates irrelevance.
The future will not belong to the companies with the most AI.
It will belong to the companies with the most trusted AI.
PR: The most exciting thing happening in telecom today is that wholesale is becoming sexy again.
Historically, wholesale telecom was measured in minutes, roaming agreements and bandwidth. The next wholesale boom will be measured in APIs, AI agents, digital identity, compute and ecosystem transactions.
We’re already seeing the foundations emerge through Open Gateway, network-as-a-service, API monetization, edge computing, sovereign AI infrastructure and digital marketplaces. Wholesale is no longer simply an interconnection business. It is becoming the distribution layer of the AI economy.
For twenty years operators monetized traffic.
The next twenty years will be about monetizing intelligence.
Operators already possess assets that many digital platforms spend years trying to build: trusted customer relationships, billing infrastructure, digital identity, regulatory trust, distribution scale and real-time intelligence. Those assets position operators to move beyond connectivity and become orchestrators of healthcare ecosystems, fintech ecosystems, education ecosystems, gaming ecosystems and enterprise ecosystems.
Every API becomes a product. Every partner becomes a revenue stream. Every interaction becomes a monetizable event.
The most successful companies of the last two decades—from Amazon to Uber and Airbnb—created value by orchestrating interactions rather than owning every asset. Telecom operators now have the opportunity to do the same at an entirely different scale because they sit at the intersection of connectivity, trust, identity and commerce.
The future operator doesn’t simply connect businesses. It orchestrates outcomes between them.
The real opportunity is not ecosystem participation. It is ecosystem ownership. Because in the AI economy, the highest margins will not belong to those who move data. They will belong to those who orchestrate the intelligence flowing through it.
PR: Zero-touch is often described as a future vision.
In reality, it has already begun.
AI is already predicting churn, optimizing campaigns, automating fulfilment, improving network performance and personalizing customer experiences in real time. The technology is no longer the limiting factor. Integration is.
Most operators still have islands of intelligence connected by oceans of process.
The next stage is connecting those islands into a single autonomous operating model.
The real shift isn’t from manual to automated.
It’s from reactive to predictive.
For decades, telecom operated around a familiar rhythm: Plan. Build. Launch. Bill.
The AI-native operator will operate very differently: Sense. Predict. Decide. Act. Monetize.
That shift fundamentally changes the role of BSS.
Traditional BSS platforms were designed to record transactions after they happened. The future BSS will influence transactions before they happen. Instead of documenting business activity, it will actively shape business outcomes through real-time decisioning and continuous optimization.
Tomorrow’s BSS won’t simply record revenue. It will generate it.
Over the next three to five years, AI-native architectures, cloud-native platforms and closed-loop automation will become increasingly mainstream. But the bigger story isn’t about efficiency.
The telecom industry has spent twenty years automating costs.
The next decade will be about automating growth.
PR: The telecom industry has spent decades automating operations.
The next frontier is automating growth.
Most companies still discover opportunities in monthly reports. AI discovers them while they’re happening.
Autonomous revenue is what happens when AI stops helping the business and starts participating in the business.
Imagine a customer signal appears. AI identifies intent, assembles the right offer, engages the right ecosystem partner, launches the service, optimizes pricing and continuously improves profitability. All in real time.
No quarterly planning cycles.
No manual campaign execution.
No waiting six months to discover whether something worked.
The goal isn’t faster reporting.
It’s faster earning.
At Tecnotree, we are helping operators build this capability through AI-native digital BSS, ecosystem monetization, digital marketplaces, fintech services, intelligent customer engagement and trusted AI frameworks. The objective is simple: shorten the distance between insight and revenue.
Growth is becoming a software problem.
The operators that win will not necessarily have the largest subscriber bases or the largest networks. They will have the fastest intelligence loops and the ability to convert intent into action, action into outcomes and outcomes into revenue.
For decades telecom connected people.
The next decade telecom will connect intelligence.
And that may be the biggest opportunity this industry has seen since the birth of mobile communications.
