Enterprise AI for telecommunications: How to turn investments into business value in 2026

The telecommunications industry stands at a pivotal inflection point in AI transformation as we enter what’s being called the “IQ Era” by Mobile World Congress 2026 (MWC), a period where human creativity, tech progress and connected intelligence shape society and industry.

Telecom leaders managing vast networks and increasing customer expectations face a critical question: How can AI investments across network operations, customer service and business processes become measurable enterprise value?

The IQ Era marks a fundamental shift for telecommunications brands. It is imperative that they progress from connectivity providers to intelligence operators. This means networks must sense, decide and optimize autonomously. Customer experiences must evolve from reactive support to predictive, AI-driven engagement. And business operating models must adapt to capture value from AI across the enterprise, not just in isolated experiments.

The answer to how AI investments can bring real value isn’t found in pilots or proof-of-concept projects. True ROI comes from enterprise scale AI deployment that transforms the customer experience, optimizes network operations and creates new business models.

For telecoms, the path from pilot to production requires addressing three critical dimensions that define success in 2026 and beyond. Intelligent infrastructure, sustainable innovation and AI-driven automation form the operating backbone that turns AI from experimentation into measurable business value.

This article explores each of these dimensions — examining how intelligent infrastructure enables enterprise AI deployment, how sustainable innovation ensures AI evolves with your business and how AI-driven automation transforms CX — with real-world examples and proven results from TELUS Digital's work with leading telecommunications providers.

How is intelligent infrastructure enabling enterprise AI at scale for telecoms?

Intelligent infrastructure is the orchestration layer that manages complex AI ecosystems across the enterprise while ensuring safety, governance and accuracy. Unlike traditional infrastructure that simply hosts applications, intelligent infrastructure enables real-time optimization of networks and services, leading to lower operational expenditures, higher reliability and the ability to adapt dynamically to changing business demands.

The telecommunications industry is already responding to the urgent need for AI-ready infrastructure. Communications service providers (CSPs) are making significant investments in modernizing their business and operations support system environments. What’s more, global spending on software and services in telecom is expected to reach USD $80 billion by 2028, according to Analysys Mason.

Yet infrastructure alone isn’t enough. What separates successful AI deployments from stalled initiatives is this intelligent infrastructure — the difference between simply running AI applications and running them in a way that compounds value across the entire organization. For example, a telecom operator might deploy AI for network optimization, customer service chatbots and fraud detection, but without intelligent infrastructure, these systems operate in silos. Intelligent infrastructure connects them: insights from network performance data inform customer service interactions, while fraud detection patterns help refine billing accuracy, creating compounding value that isolated AI tools cannot deliver.

What platform enables intelligent infrastructure for enterprise AI?

TELUS Digital developed Fuel iX — a generative AI (GenAI) engine to address precisely this challenge. Already proven at scale with over 50,000 TELUS team members, the platform enables organizations to manage their entire GenAI ecosystem within a unified framework designed for responsible enterprise deployment.

In the AI world, tokens are the currency of experience. They translate human needs, such as questions, clicks and requests, into a format AI systems can process and respond to. Just like money measures economic value, tokens measure experiential value. They distinguish organizations experimenting with AI from those operating it at scale. In 2025 alone, TELUS Digital processed over 2 trillion tokens through our Fuel iX platform.

“Fuel iX was created to fill a gap left by other GenAI solutions — to enable enterprise-wide management of an organization’s GenAI applications, foundation models, data sources and tools within a platform built from the ground up to deliver safe, responsible and accurate AI-powered experiences,” explains Bret Kinsella, GM and SVP, Fuel iX at TELUS Digital. “Sustainable AI success is about more than models and applications. It requires agility, control and trust.”

How can telecoms maintain sustainable AI innovation?

When it comes to AI, sustainable innovation means ensuring the tech isn’t a one-off pilot, but embedded into platforms, systems and operating models that are designed to evolve in step with changing business needs, emerging technologies, new regulations and customer demand.

For telecommunications providers, this means moving beyond quick wins toward AI implementations that compound value over time.

TELUS Digital’s approach demonstrates how sustainable innovation manifests across the AI lifecycle.

Responsible AI foundation

Trust is the essential ingredient that gives organizations the confidence to drive innovation and scale AI solutions. That trust is built through thoughtful governance, reliable operations, quality data and validated AI models and applications. TELUS Digital's Humanity-in-the-Loop framework operationalizes this commitment through three core principles: design for humans by bringing people together to address innovation challenges, ensure performance starts with people through world-class engagement and consider lasting impacts through responsible leadership. This human-centered approach ensures AI augments rather than replaces human expertise.

High-quality, ethically sourced training data reduces bias and improves model accuracy. TELUS Digital’s data annotation services and Ground Truth Studio platform enable this foundation, supporting everything from network optimization to CX enhancement.

Automated vulnerability detection during application development and monitoring for AI safety and security regression during production is also critical. No one wants a integral system taken offline because of an avoidable security incident. TELUS Digital developed Fuel iX Fortify to address gaps in legacy automated red team testing tools to deliver more comprehensive and efficient AI vulnerability detection, risk mapping and monitoring. Beyond AI system validation, Fortify technology has also been used to benchmark the key risk categories of leading AI models to better inform technology selection during the application development process.

Intelligent operations

AI-powered systems can proactively identify network and billing issues before they impact customers. In telecom billing, AI can automate error detection, flagging misapplied promotions or inconsistent charges, to improve accuracy and reduce revenue leakage. In network operations, AI can process terabytes of data to predict customer experience issues and churn in real time.

In collaboration with our parent company, TELUS, we developed the Customer Network Experience Score (CNES), an AI-powered network optimization framework that generates near real-time predictions for every wireless customer, enabling engineers to resolve network performance issues proactively. With prediction confidence scores of 85–95%, CNES improved service reliability and reduced customer churn by 34% among at-risk subscribers — insights that enabled targeted retention strategies and smarter network investment decisions.

“We’re demonstrating how TELUS Digital has deployed AI across our own operations,” notes Kinsella. “The key is helping telecommunications providers transform their customer and enterprise experiences through the complete lifecycle — not just implementing AI technology, but elevating their people and business performance."

Strategic partnerships

Sustainable innovation requires partnerships that extend beyond technology implementation to include ongoing optimization, knowledge transfer and system evolution. TELUS Digital demonstrates this through strategic relationships with AI technology providers and enterprise Software as a Service (SaaS) platforms and cloud infrastructure partners that bring specialized capabilities to telecommunications providers.

These partnerships span the AI lifecycle, including cloud-native contact center platforms that integrate customer service workflows with AI, data and analytics partners to enable intelligent insights and predictive analytics, and security and compliance partners for ensuring responsible AI deployment. Through these partnerships, TELUS Digital enables telecommunications providers to access integrated capabilities without managing disparate vendor relationships.

How are AI-driven automation assisting agents to improve customer experience?

Nowhere is AI’s transformative potential more evident than in CX. The business case is compelling: Research by McKinsey shows that telecom operators who fully leverage analytics and data-driven personalization for customer value management can increase revenue by up to 10%, while boosting customer satisfaction and engagement by 20–30%.

Yet realizing this potential requires balancing automation with human expertise and understanding that effective AI-driven CX exists on a spectrum, from human-led support to fully autonomous agentic AI.

Enabling the right level of AI assistance based on interaction complexity is critical, with human-led support essential for high-stakes situations that require empathy and creative problem-solving. Effective AI-driven CX operates on a spectrum of automation, with the right approach depending on interaction complexity:

• AI-assisted agents leverage automation and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to surface relevant information and recommendations, empowering faster, more accurate resolutions.
• Agentic AI acts independently to handle complex customer issues from start to finish, interpreting invoices, clarifying charges and resolving disputes without human intervention.
• Meanwhile, robotic process automation handles structured tasks in the background, improving accuracy and compliance.

The result is CX that feels more personal, not less, because AI equips agents with comprehensive customer information, actionable insights and next-best-action recommendations. This creates a more connected, intelligent customer service experience that optimizes agent performance and streamlines support operations across real-time and asynchronous channels.

“The contact center has traditionally been viewed as a cost center, but AI is changing that equation,” notes Kinsella. “In addition to getting real-time support and insights, agents can now train and onboard in less time, learn new information and skills more quickly with better retention and performance. This enables them to handle more complex interactions, increases first-call resolution and frees up time for revenue-generating activities.”

Fuel iX Agent Trainer demonstrates this transformation in action. By providing AI-powered simulations with realistic voice and chat practice in safe, judgment-free environments, organizations can cut ramp time by up to 50% and improve CSAT. For example, a leading payments processor leveraged Agent Trainer to upskill new agents while maintaining a high quality customer experience. The tool helped to build essential cognitive muscle memory, allowing the organization to reduce agent ramp-up time. As a result, the client successfully mitigated the typical post-training performance dip, resulting in a 16% overall increase in CSAT and a significant 29% point improvement specifically within the chat channel.

Three success factors for telecom AI transformation

The telecommunications industry’s AI transformation reflects the broader promise of the IQ Era, where AI-driven prediction and automation augment human expertise to create positive outcomes — combining the best of technological capability with human insight. According to NVIDIA’s State of AI in Telecommunications: 2025 Trends report, 44% of telecom operators identify customer experience optimization as their top AI investment priority, followed by 40% investing in network planning and operations.

Yet investment alone doesn’t guarantee success. Organizations that thrive in this new era share common goals, including:

• Building intelligent infrastructure before scaling pilots,
• Prioritizing sustainable innovation over quick wins and
• Designing AI-driven automation that augments human capabilities and expertise.

The gap between AI experimentation and AI value delivery is closing — but only for those willing to invest in the foundational systems that enable production-scale deployment.

As the telecommunications industry continues its transformation, the question isn’t whether AI will reshape operations and CX — it’s whether organizations have the infrastructure, approach and partnerships to capture that value while competitors are still stuck in pilot mode.

The IQ Era imperative: infrastructure, innovation and intelligent automation

The telecommunications industry's transformation hinges on a fundamental truth: AI investments deliver measurable enterprise value only when supported by the right foundation. Organizations that build intelligent infrastructure before expanding pilots, prioritize sustainable innovation over quick wins and design AI-driven automation that augments human expertise are already seeing the results. The path from AI investment to enterprise value is no longer theoretical. It is being built today by telecommunications providers willing to move beyond pilots and invest in the foundational systems that enable AI to scale at enterprise level.