3 Tech Trends Driving Telco Transformation in 2025

In 2025, service providers face mounting pressure to move beyond cost-cutting measures and accelerate infrastructure and operations transformation to hit opex and revenue goals. Every infrastructure investment and solution adoption will be evaluated from this point of view.

While GenAI continues to gain traction in customer interactions, its near-term revenue impact remains limited — for now. To achieve immediate revenue gains, service providers will increasingly look to AIOps and ML solutions to unlock actionable insights — like understanding how their most profitable customers consume services to fuel business expansion.

Automation and orchestration will also take center stage, enabling CSPs to innovate and deliver complex, customizable services as they expand investments in cloud, edge, 5G, and enterprise offerings. Turning infrastructure into revenue-generating products will depend on their ability to orchestrate processes seamlessly across networks and clouds, making these services scalable and easy to deliver.

To support these efforts, CSPs will continue re-tooling their OSS stacks for faster service and billing changes.

Let’s dive into the top automation trends shaping telecommunications this year:

Recent years have seen CSPs prioritize opex reduction due to a number of factors, most notably a lack of significant revenue generated by heavy investment in 5G infrastructure. At the same time, their largest and most advanced customers are demanding more complex, customized services at an increasing rate to support their evolving business needs. The way service providers view opex will need to be updated — measures like simple cost-saving, staff reduction, inventory audits, energy efficiency initiatives and decommissioning legacy devices have not moved the needle enough.

Significant opex reduction will be driven by re-engineering the telco operating model around automation and AIOps. Over the next 12 months, expect companies to make major strides towards multi-domain orchestration and the ability to embed AI-driven analysis into every infrastructure change.

Recently, CSPs have been focused on the standardization of generic function APIs to enable more development and innovation across the network — but this area of focus has not unlocked significant revenue.

While there are a few areas where these areas will deliver business benefits, particularly with APIs related to SIM management, the industry has largely adapted around the limitations of traditional service provider infrastructure, introducing alternative solutions for basic network functions.

Generic function APIs are not where the value lies. To meet the growing demands of advanced enterprise customers, SPs must pivot. The next wave of innovation will be the delivery of complex, dynamic, customizable services via consumable APIs to meet the needs of rapidly innovating customers and quickly grow revenue for providers.

Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) remains a key focus for service providers, but implementing it successfully is demanding greater transformation than initially anticipated. Crucially, existing service provider OSS stacks lack the flexibility to support the speed of changes across complex infrastructure required to deliver network as a service.

To move forward, providers must undertake significant re-tooling efforts, rethinking their foundational systems and processes. This transformation will be essential to unlocking the full potential of NaaS, enabling providers to deliver flexible, scalable, and customer-centric services that align with the demands of a rapidly changing market.

At Itential, we’re empowering service providers to accelerate innovation, optimize costs, and drive new revenue by automating and orchestrating their large, complex networks.

With the ability to integrate rapidly across diverse technologies, CSPs can deliver high-value services faster, meet evolving customer demands, and transform their networks to support agility and innovation. Learn more about Itential orchestration for service providers here.