Telecom Has an AI Strategy. What It Needs Is an AI Business Model.
For years, MNOs and MVNOs battled stagnant ARPU, slow revenue growth, and increased infrastructure costs. PWC’s Global Telecoms Outlook indicates global telecom revenues may grow only 2.9% per year while ARPU will decline 2% annually through 2028 (mobile, fixed broadband, and voice services).
While much of the telecom industry came to accept “efficiency” as their primary growth path, AI is starting to disrupt that thinking. The question shifts from, “How can operators utilize AI to reduce costs?” to “Can AI create meaningful new revenue streams?
The telecom monetization space is experiencing a revolution, transitioning from operational AI tools, into basic GenAI integrations for customer service support, and soon into a fully Agentic AI-based ecosystem that identifies and guides customer purchase behavior in a real-time environment.
While Telco CEOs do embrace AI, “60% said their organization is using or assessing generative AI, up from 49% in 2024.” (2026 Telco Survey) The issue I have found is that telcos don’t have a technology problem, they have a business model problem, one that AI by itself can’t solve.
AI – Building Relationships at Scale
We are entering a world where AI is no longer just a tool operating in the background. It is becoming the voice, judgement and behaviour customers associate directly with a brand. In this new era, performance alone is not enough. What will differentiate companies is their ability to create AI experiences that feel coherent, responsible, and genuinely human in the way they interact. Agentic AI will be a significant player in this endeavor.
However, the real power of Agentic systems is not automation for its own sake, but for its capacity to understand context, adapt intelligently, and engage customers with the right balance of precision and empathy. Tomorrow’s leaders will be those who use AI not simply to reduce friction, but to build stronger relationships at scale. That is when the customer experience stops being just a support function and starts becoming a strategic advantage.
AI Integration into the Business Systems is Key
The intelligent agents are only as powerful as the systems they can access.
If AI cannot seamlessly retrieve contextual customer data, understand entitlements, trigger workflows, adapt offers or interact dynamically with core BSS capabilities, the experience immediately breaks down. The agent becomes fragmented, inconsistent, and ultimately untrustworthy.
This is why the future of customer experience will not be defined by AI models alone. It will depend on how deeply AI agents are integrated into the operational intelligence of the business itself.
The next generation of BSS will not simply expose APIs. It will act as a real-time orchestration layer where AI agents, customer journeys, billing logic, subscriptions, and operational processes continuously interact with one another.
In that world, the BSS evolves from a back-office platform into the cognitive engine of the enterprise.
And the companies that succeed will be those capable of combining autonomous AI with a unified, agile and deeply connected operational core. The future is not AI on top of the business but embedded within it.
Enter MCP for a Better AI Integration
The goal at this point is not “productivity AI” – helping customer service agents (or GenAI based systems) craft a better answer to a customer inquiry. The new focus is now “monetization AI” – where the system can change a plan, apply for credit, launch an add-on, trigger an order, update the billing arrangement, or onboard a new brand.
To accomplish this requires Agentic AI and a BSS that allows these automated agents to operate efficiently and effectively across various data sources. MCP is the tool that unlocks this functionality.
Model Context Protocol (MCP), a relatively new addition to the AI toolbox that Anthropic released in 2024. It is an open-source standard for “connecting AI assistants to the systems where data lives, including content repositories, business tools, and development environments.”
MCP enables AI applications like Claude (Agentic AI) or ChatGPT (GenAI) to connect to various data sources, tools and workflows, gaining access to key information that is used by the AI tool to perform specific tasks.
For telcos utilizing a modern AI-friendly BSS incorporating MCP, and Open APIs, AI agents can operate within the system efficiently and effectively to deliver better real-time offers and plan adjustments based on microtargeting customers from their specific profile and unique behaviors.
The BSS houses all the customer-facing operational systems and data (CRM, billing and invoicing, order management, and service provisioning). The MCP acts as a standardization translation layer that wraps around Open APIs to make them discoverable and triggerable by AI models.
How Can This Technology be Monetized?
MNOs have found that monetization from network technology upgrades, particularly with 5G implementations, have not translated into better customer monetization and ARPU increases.
Despite the rapid uptake, monetization remains uneven. According to the Global System for Mobile Communications Association’s (GSMA) Global Mobile Trends 2026 report, 5G accounts for nearly 2.8 billion connections worldwide, yet mobile revenue growth has been “sluggish for much of the 5G era,” often barely keeping pace with inflation. – EE Times
As a result, telcos are looking at other avenues for increased revenues. Here are a few.
- Service Bundling: As the smartphone continues to be a lifestyle hub for consumers, telcos can increasingly leverage this to partner with relevant service providers to deliver a more complete experience in one place. This includes not just mobile phone + home internet. It can also include content streaming services, utilities and home automation technologies, and satellite communication.
- AI-Driven Personalization and Churn Prevention: This is a big area where AI technologies and an AI-ready BSS can play a big role. AI can identify customers likely to churn or uncover customers with a profile that indicates an offeropportunity. Using this microtargeting data can allow telcos to not just roll out new plans every six months to a year that are not targeted to specific customers and prospects, but to be able to deliver a unique offer to an individual based on their specific buying and attention behaviors where a certain offer might be more persuasive. This can deliver a 5-10% reduction in churn or a 2-4% ARPU uplift – significant in an era of tight margins and MVNO competition.
- Emerging Services: This is an ever-evolving arena of opportunity. With AI tools and a supportive BSS, it will be easier than ever to connect new products and services with customers. Smart homes, cloud storage, cybersecurity, and edge computing are all potentially lucrative avenues for telcos to explore. Others are sure to follow.
triPica is at the Forefront of AI-based Monetization
As the telecom industry has evolved from a digital-first platform to an AI-native one, AI can now drive profits, not just productivity. GSMA is now seeing operators shift from internal AI use cases towards monetisation.
triPica continues to evolve to stay at the forefront of these technology advances. We recognized that providing a BSS that onboards digital brands quickly in today’s environment is not enough.
triPica is now implementing a shared MCP architecture that will deliver a machine-readable, agent-ready commercial stack. With MCP-exposed surfaces, OpenAPI foundations, project-specific adapters and a governed ProductOrder execution path, triPica is no longer just a digital BSS. It is the layer through which AI agents can read context, request actions and safely trigger commercial outcomes.
With this implementation, triPica delivers a BSS stack for AI-native telcos that want to monetise AI, not just gain productivity from AI.
