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Telcos hold a strategic position in the flow of real-time communications. They have an opportunity to turn it into something more valuable than transport. Nuwave Communications Chief Data & AI Officer Joseph Farrar explains.
Joseph Farrar
From transport to trust: carriers’ evolving role in the AI agent era
For decades, telecom carriers have had a clear mission: reliably connect people, businesses and networks. A customer places a call. The network finds a route. The carrier delivers the communication.
That model has survived enormous technological shifts, from analog networks to digital switching, from time-division multiplexing (TDM) to Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), and from traditional private branch exchanges (PBXs) to cloud communications. The underlying assumption, however, has largely remained the same: The carrier transports the conversation, while the people or applications on either end determine what the conversation means.
AI is beginning to challenge that assumption. As AI agents increasingly answer calls, make appointments, negotiate transactions, verify information, provide customer service, collect payments and communicate with other AI agents, the network will be carrying something fundamentally different.
It will no longer be enough to know where a call came from. We will increasingly need to know who, or what, is speaking.
Telecom networks already contain significant trust infrastructure. Phone numbers establish identity. Caller ID provides context. STIR/SHAKEN attempts to provide confidence that originating numbers have not been spoofed.
Emergency services depend on location and identity data. Enterprises depend on carriers to apply routing policies, regulatory controls, lawful interception requirements, call recording policies and fraud protections.
These capabilities were created primarily for a world where humans were assumed to be on both ends of a conversation. That assumption is disappearing.
Imagine receiving a call from your bank five years from now. The voice sounds human, knows your account history, answers questions instantly and can execute transactions on your behalf:
Today, the network has very few ways to communicate those distinctions. That is a problem, but it is also an enormous opportunity for service providers.
The next generation of communications may require a new layer of identity. Instead of simply presenting a phone number, communications networks could potentially communicate additional information about the entity participating in a conversation.
These questions move the industry far beyond traditional call routing into the business of digital trust. For telcos this could become a natural extension of capabilities they already provide.
They already sit between enterprises, consumers, cloud communications platforms, contact centers and the public-switched telephone network (PSTN). Few industries occupy such a strategic position in the flow of real-time communications. The opportunity is to turn that position into something more valuable than transport.
For years, much of the telecom industry has competed on connectivity:
Those capabilities will continue to matter, but connectivity is becoming increasingly commoditized.
AI creates an opportunity to move higher in the value chain. A carrier could provide policy enforcement for AI communications, for example. Enterprises might define rules determining which AI agents can place external calls, what destinations they may reach, which transactions they can perform or when a human must enter the conversation.
Carriers could provide verified AI identity services that allow receiving organizations to know that an AI agent genuinely represents a particular company. They could provide consent management, audit trails, compliance enforcement, fraud scoring and interaction provenance.
In other words, the telco becomes part of the decision about whether a communication should be trusted. That is a much more defensible role than simply transporting packets.
The transformation becomes even more significant when both sides of the conversation are automated.
At that point, communications networks are no longer simply connecting people. They are connecting software agents that can potentially make decisions, exchange sensitive information and create financial or legal consequences.
The network needs ways to establish identity, authorization, accountability and provenance between these agents. Telcos are uniquely positioned to participate in solving that problem because they already operate the trusted infrastructure through which many of these interactions will occur.
The telecom industry has spent decades monetizing minutes, numbers, seats, trunks and connectivity. The AI era will introduce entirely new categories of communications services that will become as fundamental to enterprise communications as phone numbers and SIP connectivity are today:
AI is not making telecommunications less important. It may ultimately make the network more consequential.
For decades, carriers were paid to connect the conversation. In the AI agent era, the greater opportunity may be establishing whether that conversation can be trusted.
