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At DTW Ignite 2025, Huawei Software will partner with TM Forum to host a Spotlight session examining how AI drives both operational excellence and revenue growth for carriers, with insights from leading global telecom executives. John Wan, Director of Software Marketing Department, Global Technical Service Dept (GTS), Huawei, shares updated insights and details of the company’s other activities at the event.
John Wan, Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd
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Unleashing AI-powered digital transformation for operational efficiency and business growth
In this in-depth dialogue with TM Forum, John Wan (JW), Director of Software Marketing Department, Global Technical Service Dept (GTS), Huawei, explains how Huawei Software leverages AI to fuel product innovation, delivering proven the dual ‘efficiency + revenue’ improvements for carriers.
As highlighted by the theme of the DTW25 – Pathways to Growth – reshaping the trajectory of growth requires a fundamental rethinking of investment priorities. Huawei Software sees AI and ‘to be’ as two key growth opportunities for carriers. Turning these opportunities into real results isn’t easy – there are some common challenges that need to be addressed along the way.
First, in developing their B2B business, carriers tend to overinvest in infrastructure such as fiber networks and data centers, while underinvesting in B2B application software like CRM and sales automation. As a result, account managers continue to rely on outdated tools such as Excel to manage leads and opportunities, making it difficult to digitize processes and efficiency gains, which significantly hampers the scale-up of ‘to be’ services.
Second, in building AI capabilities, although infrastructure-level investments in computing power resources are accelerating, there is still a lack of AI applications that are business-aligned, such as intelligent billing, precise marketing and intelligent customer service. This disconnect makes it difficult to create a closed loop from resource input to business outcome, greatly weakening AI’s potential to drive revenue growth for carriers.
JW: We’re seeing new solutions, for either enterprise or consumer, starting to take off as AI drives the expansion of the telecom space. A lot of untouched niche markets are now being explored across different industries.
AI is really changing the game by bringing advanced technology into application software.
In fact, Huawei has been actively analyzing and integrating AI technologies, including discriminative AI, large language models (LLMs), Generative AI (GenAI), and agentic AI. In practice, Huawei has applied these technologies to transform telecom business processes, leading to innovative scenarios. They range across all the key domains of BSS and create values for carriers.
In the standard IG1428 AI for BSS that we plan to release during the Spotlight session, we co-contributed with other participants to describe how AI can drive the profound changes in these scenarios:
These scenarios fully explore and demonstrate AI's potential to transform operations, improve customer experience and drive revenue growth.
Each AI scenario in this standard is dedicatedly designed to apply AI technology to achieve the new growth or better customer experience. Only when carriers build the BSS to harness AI technology in all these scenarios – billing, CRM, call center, mobile money and other application software – can AI bring the true values to carriers.
JW: The B2B and B2B2X market is rapidly growing and becoming more competitive, with enterprise customers demanding more value-added solutions and omnichannel experiences.
However, many CSPs are still using outdated, siloed and complex BSS systems that obstruct their ability to launch new services. Huawei has found that new B2B services must be implemented in the dedicated BSS stack, just as every lock requires a specific key.
Without it, if carriers aim to go digital and offer enterprise solutions, the transformation remains superficial if account managers are still tracking leads and opportunities with pen and paper.
CSPs need to refactor their B2B BSS solutions using the principles of Open Digital Architecture (ODA), especially the ODA-in-a-box standards to simplify the previous complicated IT stack. A new BSS is the base of large-scale business evolution for any CSP. That is also why Huawei has worked on some B2B standards with TM Forum, such as IG1340 Using ODA Establish B2B BSS Reference Solution Architecture.
JW: Through our AI-driven system engine, we are redefining the deep connections between people, scenarios, and commercial value. In fact, one of our clients will share some of our collaborative practices in this DTW — such as addressing persistent operational challenges faced by carriers: How to optimize engagement with key audiences and boost marketing conversion rates; and how to accurately match plan preferences and improve recommendation success rates.
Our breakthrough solution is, building an intelligent engine that leverages reinforcement learning algorithms to dynamically optimize the combination of users, scenarios, and service plans. This reconstructs both offer development models and customer experience journeys, enabling truly "personalized" offer design and delivery—driving significant improvements in marketing conversions and recommendation success rates for our clients.
Another particularly interesting case comes from within Huawei itself. As a large enterprise with extensive customer service teams across diverse business units, we began leveraging AI in our Enterprise Business Contact Center starting last year. By intelligently analyzing full-scale data, the system now enables intelligent identification of potential sales opportunities. In 2024 alone, it contributed over $10 million in new sales revenue, marking a significant step in transforming our call center from a cost center into a revenue center.
