Unlocking software-driven business transformation in telco

Over the past several years, I've watched telecommunications companies navigate an increasingly difficult paradox. The telco executives I speak with routinely describe investing billions in network infrastructure, only to struggle capturing value from those investments. The numbers tell a sobering story: in 2024, the return on invested capital (ROIC) for telcos dropped well below the median weighted average cost of capital (WACC), falling as far as 6.7%.

What makes this particularly frustrating for these leaders is watching digital-native companies like Netflix, WhatsApp, and Google generate massive revenues using the very infrastructure telcos built. Time and again, I've seen telcos relegated to the sidelines as their networks, which are increasingly commoditized, create immense value for tech companies and hyperscalers.

The telecommunications executives who grasp this reality understand that Communication Service Providers (CSPs) and Network Equipment Providers (NEPs) must transform into software-driven technology companies. In my experience working with industry leaders, those that make the "telco-to-techco" transition position themselves for competitive advantage and unlock new growth opportunities that their competitors miss.

Why legacy software development approaches undermine telco innovation

Whether you are a CSP diversifying into digital services or a NEP delivering cloud-native network functions, you need a modern software development foundation on which to build. Unfortunately, legacy processes prevent many telcos from establishing this foundation.

Innovation velocity gaps

Some telcos have release cycles that are 18+ months long. Digital-native competitors, on the other hand, iterate through continuous deployment cycles in days or weeks. Hardware-based deployments play a big role in creating these innovation bottlenecks, prompting the industry shift toward software-based alternatives.

The innovation velocity gap impacts CSPs' revenue diversification efforts because new digital services require rapid iteration to find market fit. Subsidiaries tasked with entering IoT, edge computing, or digital payment solutions struggle to compete when constrained by legacy processes.

NEPs face similar pressures, as lengthy development and deployment cycles strain relationships with CSPs who need faster deployment and reconfiguration of network modernization solutions.

Security and compliance overhead

Regulatory requirements add complexity, leading to more inefficiency. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requires comprehensive data lineage tracking and audit trails. Industry best practices, including ETSI guidance on NFV testing and operations (such as NFV-TST 006), recommend that CSPs and NEPs adopt synchronized software delivery processes through continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD).

Unfortunately, due to fragmented development toolchains, telcos must aggregate data across incompatible systems, maintain audit trails, and coordinate deployments — often in a manual fashion.

Barriers to AI-powered automation

AI-powered software development presents a major opportunity for telcos, but fragmented toolchains hinder effective AI implementations. This may partly explain why telcos trail other industries in operationalizing AI.

When contextual data is sprawled across disparate systems, it leaves AI with a limited view of your business. Because AI systems thrive on context, this restricted view leads to poor outputs.

Security and governance further complicate matters. Telcos must carefully control which data AI tools can access, implement governance policies, and avoid vendors that train their models on proprietary data.

Lastly, popular AI point solutions fixate on code generation while neglecting the broader software development lifecycle. Developers spend less than a quarter of their time writing code. What about the other three-quarters of the development process? Telcos that rely on these AI coding assistants will struggle to meaningfully improve their time-to-market.

Driving telco transformation with a unified AI-native platform

A unified AI-native platform that enables both DevSecOps and GitOps practices removes the many barriers to telco transformation. It accelerates innovation on a large scale while strengthening security and compliance.

Platform unification removes operational silos

A unified platform eliminates operational silos that cause widespread inefficiency. It replaces fragmented toolchains with integrated workflows, enabling better collaboration between network operations and digital services teams — and removes the need to translate data between incompatible systems. Key outcomes include:

• Greater capital efficiency: CSPs avoid excessive tool investments across subsidiaries and business units
• Accelerated market responsiveness: Teams launch new services faster through better coordination
• Vendor ecosystem optimization: NEPs deliver software updates and network functions through standardized processes that CSPs can integrate seamlessly
• Strategic execution alignment: Network modernization and revenue diversification initiatives improve with shared visibility and better coordination
• Reduced talent waste: Engineering resources focus on customer value creation rather than managing tools

Agentic AI acts as a force multiplier

When a platform natively integrates agentic AI capabilities across both development and infrastructure operations, it yields large-scale productivity gains. The platform orchestrates autonomous AI workflows across the entire software lifecycle, enabling human-AI collaboration with complete business context. This delivers:

• Revenue acceleration through automation: Addresses the entire software development process beyond code generation, enabling telcos to launch digital services faster and capture emerging IoT, edge computing, 5G applications, and other high-growth digital markets
• Dramatic cycle time reduction: Development cycles accelerate from months to weeks/days
• Operational cost reduction: Automatic CI/CD pipeline failure diagnosis and deployment optimization reduce engineering overhead, freeing teams for innovation
• Data sovereignty and privacy protection: Privacy-first AI architecture with self-managed deployment options for air-gapped environments, granular permissions control, and commitment to never training models on customer data
• Improved competitiveness: Enables telcos to dramatically increase their innovation velocity while maintaining regulatory compliance

Automated security and compliance removes transformation barriers

The platform’s DevSecOps capabilities eliminate the trade-off between speed and compliance. They automate security scanning and compliance workflows throughout the development lifecycle, strengthening telcos’ security posture while accelerating time-to-market. Critical business outcomes include:

• Cyber risk reduction: Automated threat detection and vulnerability management protect against cyber attacks
• Supply chain transparency: Complete visibility into third-party software components and dependencies reduces vendor risk
• Compliance workflow automation: GDPR data protection, CSRD environmental reporting, and ETSI/BEREC standards adherence through automated workflows eliminates manual compliance overhead
• Audit readiness: Real-time traceability and documentation reduce the time and cost of regulatory audits while ensuring continuous compliance
• Operational resilience: Proactive security monitoring and automated policy enforcement prevent security incidents that can cause costly service disruptions

Infrastructure automation enables network modernization

The platform’s GitOps capabilities address the manual infrastructure deployments and configuration management challenges that slow telco transformation. The platform treats all network infrastructure as version-controlled code, enabling automated, consistent deployments across complex environments. Infrastructure automation delivers:

• Network function modernization: Automates 5G and cloud-native network function deployments using Kubernetes orchestration, reducing deployment time while ensuring consistency across environments
• Multi-vendor coordination: Standardized deployment processes enable synchronized delivery between NEPs and CSPs, meeting ETSI requirements while accelerating time-to-market for new services
• Risk mitigation through automation: Version-controlled infrastructure configurations provide complete audit trails and instant rollback capabilities, reducing the operational risk that regulatory bodies and boards scrutinize
• Operational cost reduction: Reduces manual configuration management, freeing engineers to focus on strategic initiatives

Learn how Deutsche Telekom achieved dramatic business results with GitLab, demonstrating the competitive advantage of a unified platform for telcos.

Your transformation opportunity

Threats from digital-native competitors continue to mount. By transforming into software-driven technology companies, telcos can overcome these threats and capture more value from their infrastructure investments.

A unified AI-native platform that enables both DevSecOps and GitOps practices removes transformation barriers. It eliminates operational silos, accelerates innovation through agentic AI, automates security and compliance, and enables the infrastructure automation critical for network modernization and 5G monetization.

Telcos that act decisively today may emerge as industry leaders tomorrow.