AI accelerates autonomous networks and customer service gains in telecom
AI is moving from pilots to payoffs in telecom. A recent Nvidia survey of 1,038 telecom professionals (run September-November 2025) shows clear revenue impact and cost savings. About nine in 10 respondents report positive results, including 90% of operators.
The sample included a 60/40 split of management and AI practitioners across ISPs, software suppliers, network equipment providers, consultancies, operators and system integrators. The throughline: AI adoption is broad, budgets are rising, and ROI is concentrating in a few high-leverage areas.
Adoption and strategy are maturing
Generative AI has crossed the halfway mark: 60% are using or assessing it, up from 49% in 2024. Open source is central to strategy for 89% of respondents, covering both models and software.
Budgets are following the returns. 89% say AI spend will increase over the next year, up from 65% last year. More than a third expect increases above 10%.
Where ROI shows up first
- Autonomous networks: 50% cite this as the top ROI driver
- Customer service: 41% cite gains, boosted by AI for Customer Support
- Internal process optimisation: 33% report impact
"There is a seismic shift underway in the telecom industry driven by AI," said Sebastian Barros, managing director at Circles. "Autonomous networks deliver immediate ROI by eliminating human effort from repetitive, reactive workflows. The fastest impact areas are energy management, fault prediction, configuration drift correction and capacity planning."
Chetan Sharma added: "Autonomous networks are delivering return on investment faster than any other AI use case because they directly reduce outages, energy consumption and manual intervention. Agentic AI accelerates this by coordinating decisions across domains in real time."
March to autonomous networks
88% of organisations are between levels 1-3 of autonomy, as defined by the TM Forum autonomy levels. Generative and agentic AI are expected to push the industry toward level 5, where networks self-configure, self-heal and self-optimise with minimal human intervention.
- Start with quick wins: energy management, fault prediction, config drift correction, capacity planning
- Treat agents as decision co-pilots first; progress to closed-loop actions with guardrails and audit trails
- Instrument everything: real-time telemetry, intent policies, explainability and rollback plans
Edge, AI-native RAN and 6G momentum
Edge investments are reshaping architectures, pushing inference closer to users across distributed infrastructure. Telcos are also stepping up AI-native RAN and 6G work, with 77% expecting faster time to deployment for these architectures.
Top drivers: boosting spectral efficiency, improving RAN performance for edge AI apps and accelerating 6G R&D. Over three-quarters expect AI-native networks to launch before full 6G deployment. For context on platforms and stacks, see Nvidia on AI in telecommunications.
Productivity lift across teams
Nearly every respondent reports productivity gains from AI, with 26% citing major to significant improvements. The lift spans back office to network operations, as generative and agentic services reduce toil and improve task quality.
What to do next (General, IT & Development, Operations)
- Operations: Stand up closed-loop automations for the four fastest payback areas. Build playbooks, SLAs and fallbacks. Explore AI for Operations to scale runbooks and monitoring.
- IT & Development: Standardise on an AI platform that supports open source models, vector search, feature stores and observability. Prioritise data pipelines, policy engines, security reviews and cost controls.
- General leaders: Fund initiatives with measurable outcomes: outage reduction, energy savings, MTTR, AHT and NPS. Set autonomy targets by domain, and allocate budget for >10% growth where ROI is proven.
Survey snapshot
Fourth annual State of AI in Telecommunications survey by Nvidia. Fielded September-November 2025. 1,038 respondents across management and practitioners in ISPs, software suppliers, network equipment providers, consulting services, operators and system integrators.
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