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Driving instant success in the AI era is proving to be complex and challenging, but it is becoming clear that telcos that have place greater emphasis on their drive towards cloud-native IT are having an easier time than others. The move to the cloud has set up positive disciplines in the workforce, in data architectures and in IT procurement which lends itself to successful AI adoption
Dean Ramsay, TM Forum
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The OSS/BSS cloud journey inflection point is here
For a decade the telecoms industry has been striving to leverage the obvious advantages of moving their IT assets off premises and into the cloud. At the heart of this move was the need to tackle the problems associated with legacy IT paradigms, which have stunted agility, speed, innovation and ultimately growth. Along the way Communication Service Providers (CSPs) have expanded the migration to the cloud into a broad modernization exercise with the aim of making telecoms operations akin to the that of cloud natives. The learnings have been numerous along the way, and the investments large, but in the last 12 months we are seeing evidence of the inflection point where the move to the cloud is paying off for CSPs that have forged ahead. As we enter the era of AI-enabled operations, the move to the cloud is an essential component of success with AI deployment.
At TM Forum’s DTW Ignite in Copenhagen this year, Ericsson and AWS gave us insight into how their collaboration is helping CSPs like Odido in the Netherlands (formerly T-Mobile) to drive rapid transformation in their OSS/BSS and to pave the way for high-yield, targeted AI investments.
Cloud native IT solutions for telecoms obviously allows CSPs to address their existing challenges around operational efficiency and cost base and vastly improves scalability, promoting a culture of innovation in the company. Yet in the past questions over security and compliance have caused some hesitation for CSPs assessing whether to move the majority of their business to the cloud, or just new, more niche lines of business. Our survey research shows that large percentages of OSS/BSS applications are now running in the cloud, across all operational areas. Security and compliance concerns have now been allayed by many years of constant improvement by the hyperscale cloud service providers and we are now passing the adoption inflection point. Beyond this point, in the next year we expect to see a more dramatic uptick in service innovation, customer experience improvements, operational efficiency gains and cost base reductions. This of course, will be empowered by AI and will itself enable AI to be implemented into CSP operations more readily, forming a positive cycle of reinforcement.
Ericsson and AWS have been working closely for several years to re-invent the way network and IT technology partners can deliver maximum value to CSPs. The ultimate aim is to provide integrated products and services that enable CSPs to focus on achieving business outcomes, not spend millions of work hours on managing software and infrastructure. For example, their work with Odido started with a complex cloud-native billing transformation project. Switching to Ericsson’s Billing Platform on the AWS Cloud enabled Odido to introduce a modularity into their service deployment while centralizing operations and delivered enhanced performance for billing and automation processes. Modernization stories like this have positive consequences for Odido, reaching beyond the performance metrics in Billing to improve the monetization and launch of new disruptive offerings in the Dutch market, such as the Netherlands’ first 5G fixed-wireless access offering for B2C customers, Klik&Klaar.
The collaboration’s work with giffgaff in Ireland also shows the outcome-focused approach, in moving its data management in Ericsson Mediation to the AWS Cloud. The move improves giffgaff’s ability to collect data from across their network, process it to a unified and standardized format, and use the subsequent insights generated to enhance network performance, service experience, and billing accuracy, leading to improved operational efficiency and service delivery.
AI is still the hottest topic in OSS/BSS and as IT vendors build AI capabilities into their latest portfolios and CSPs experiment with AI across every area of operations to drive automation and efficiency, augmenting OSS/BSS features with AI (either predictive, generative or now agentic) is starting to pass from the proof-of-concept phase into mass market acceptance and industrialization scales.
During this phase it is essential that CSPs are able to incrementally build, refine, and deploy AI solutions within their operating and business models in an extremely agile way. At DTW 2025 Ericsson and AWS discussed how Ericsson OSS/BSS applications and AWS AI capabilities including Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Sagemaker, were working towards enabling that industrialization phase by fostering ongoing innovation to allow their CSP partners to deploy AI where they see it as most effective in the first instance.
The broadness of the AI challenge can leave many companies to a state of inaction as they are overwhelmed with the possibilities of implementing AI. In this DTW session Ericsson and AWS showed that their role is not only to provide the tools and environment in which to drive change, but to suggest a strategic approach for CSPs to derive highest return from their investments. As such OSS/BSS is now driving a sea change in CSP operations for the first time in many years, genuinely passing the inflection point into the AI-enabled operations era.
