Summary Bullets:

• Telecom companies are facing many challenges moving beyond their legacy business and adopting digital solutions including AI to drive business transformation.
• Amdocs is helping telcos to drive transformation with AI and its consulting-led services play a key role to accelerate the process from customer engagement to backend operations.

Telecommunications companies (telcos) are in various stages of transforming their businesses. The industry as a whole faces several challenges that have hindered progress.

These include regulations (e.g., to meet quality of service, data privacy, consumer protection, etc.); the need to constantly invest in their networks (e.g., upgrading mobile networks to 5G and 5G-A), legacy systems, and processes (including IT, network, and operations support system); and growing competitive pressures from traditional competitors to new telco start-ups and disruptive players (e.g., over-the-top providers, cloud providers, LEO satellite companies, etc.). They also have a huge workforce that may not be ready to transition into new technology areas such as AI, data science, cybersecurity, and cloud computing. While telcos’ leadership teams are well aware of the opportunities of emerging technologies, they have to take a more holistic approach in transforming the business, not just adding new digital capabilities. They need to reimagine their business (i.e., define the core business and operating model), right-size the organization with the right talent, adjust the company culture, and ensure effective change management.

This means opportunities for technology services providers including consulting firms, systems integrators, and other telco vendor partners to help telcos modernize their technology and transform their business. Amdocs is a key player within the telco partner ecosystem. It already serves 350 communications and media providers across more than 85 countries, including many tier-1 telcos (e.g., AT&T, BT, Telefonica, and Globe) with long-standing relationships. The company offers a range of products for catalog management, commerce and customer care, billing/monetization, network deployment and optimization, service & network automation, and more. Amdocs has also embedded AI (including GenAI and agentic AI) into its solutions. For example, its customer engagement platform is a customer relationship management (CRM) solution to deliver AI-driven customer journeys and personalized services serving both consumer and B2B customers. This is developed in partnership with Microsoft, leveraging Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Azure, verticalized for telecoms by Amdocs. Amdocs amAIz suite lays the foundation for telco data management, AI control and governance, and AI application and AI agent deployment. More importantly, since Amdocs is already embedded in telcos’ operations, the company has a deep understanding of the telco business and operational requirements. This places the company in a better position to help telcos adopt AI, particularly agentic AI, to automate workflows (from IT operations to business operations and network operations) to deliver the desired business outcomes.

However, due to the aforementioned challenges, many telcos are facing in transforming their business: They are not merely looking for more technologies but partners that can help them drive business outcomes. Many technology vendors choose to partner with service providers to help telcos close their capability gaps, recognizing the need to work across technologies from different vendors, which may require systems integration. Amdocs has taken a different approach by building a more comprehensive set of services to support telco customers, which it can also extend to customers in more verticals over time. Besides services to support network management and operations, the company is also helping telcos to transform various aspects of their business from CX to the modernization of backend systems. This is through Amdocs Studios, which has broad expertise across cloud services (e.g., strategy, migration, and operations), data and AI (e.g., data strategy, AI & analytics, and GenAI), and consulting services (e.g., experience design, product development, cybersecurity, and risk management). Amdocs is developing agentic services to support operational aspects of the Amdocs Studios’ main practices, including application modernization, data modernization, quality engineering, and more. The company has an extensive partner ecosystem to deliver the right outcomes for customers. For example, it has strategic partnerships with AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Oracle, and Red Hat to offer cloud services.

Consulting services in particular are crucial in aligning technologies with business outcomes and helping drive change especially in using cloud, data, and AI to improve customer experience, employee experience, and operations experience (the processes involved to facilitate the interaction between a customer and a brand). Successful implementation will require enterprises to focus on the experiences they want to deliver and the brand image they want to establish. In particular, a human-centered design is crucial especially in AI initiatives to promote trust and focus on the benefits to enhance human capabilities (not to replace them).

Amdocs has invested significantly to develop experience design capabilities, which will be pivotal to compete with other service providers. Some global systems integrators also have strong creative design consulting capabilities (e.g., Accenture Song, Deloitte Digital, and TCS Interactive). As businesses are adopting digital solutions to drive business and operational changes, it is imperative for service providers to have an industry-focused approach for their go-to-market. This is already the case for most global systems integrators. While Amdocs does not have the scale of some of the largest global systems integrators, it has deep expertise in the telco sector. However, the company will continue to face stiff competition from systems integrators, especially Accenture, Infosys, and HCLTech, which have made acquisitions, high-profile customer examples, and extensive partnerships with vendors important to telcos.

Summary Bullets:

• The combination of omni-channel capability, effective data management, and AI will drive better customer experience.
• As Twilio’s business evolves from CPaaS to customer experience, the company focuses its product development on themes around trust, simple, and smart.

The ability to provide superior customer experience (CX) helps a business gain customer loyalty and a strong competitive advantage. Many enterprises are looking to AI including generative AI (GenAI) and agentic AI to further boost CX by enabling faster resolution and personalized experiences.

Communications platform-as-a-service (CPaaS) vendors offer a platform that focuses on meeting omni-channel channel communications requirements. These players have now integrated a broader set of capabilities to solve CX challenges, involving different touch points including sales, marketing, and customer service. Twilio is one of the major CPaaS vendors that has moved beyond just communications applications programming interfaces (APIs), including contact center (Twilio Flex), customer data management (Segment), and conversational AI. Twilio’s product development has been focusing on three key themes: Trusted, Simple, and Smart. The company has demonstrated these themes through product announcements throughout 2025 and showcased at its SIGNAL events around the world.

Firstly, Twilio is winning customer trust through its scalable and reliable platform (e.g., 99.99% API reliability), working with all major telecom operators in each market (e.g., Optus, Telstra, and Vodafone in Australia). More importantly, it is helping clients win the trust of their customers. With the rising fraud impacting consumers, Twilio has introduced various capabilities including Silent Network Authentication and FIDO-certified passkey as part of its Verify, a user verification product. The company is also promoting the use of branded communications, which has shown to achieve consumer trust and greater willingness to engage with brands. Twilio has introduced branded calling, RCS for branded messaging, Whatsapp Business Calling, and WebRTC for browser.

The second theme is about simplifying developer experience when using the Twilio platform to achieve better CX outcomes. Twilio has long been in the business of giving businesses the ability to reach their customers through a range of communications channels. With Segment (customer data platform), Twilio enables businesses to leverage their data more effectively for gaining customer insights and taking actions. An example is the recent introduction of Event Triggered Journey (general availability in July 2025), which allows the creation of automated marketing workflows to support personalized customer journeys. This can be used to enable a responsive approach for real-time use cases, such as cart abandonment, onboarding flows, and trial-to-paid account journeys. By taking actions to promptly address issues a customer is facing can improve the chance of having a successful transaction, and a happy customer.

The third theme on ‘smart’ is about leveraging AI to make better decisions, enable differentiated experiences, and build stronger customer relationships. Twilio announced two conversational AI updates in May 2025. The first is ‘Conversational Intelligence’ (generally available for voice and private beta for messaging), which analyzes voice calls and text-based conversations and converting them into structured data and insights. This is useful for understanding sentiments, spotting compliance risks, and identifying churn risks. The other AI capability is ‘ConversationRelay’, which enables developers to create voice AI agents using their preferred LLM and integrate with customer data. Twilio is leveraging speech recognition technology and interrupt handling to enable human-like voice agents. Cedar, a financial experience platform for healthcare providers is leveraging ConversationRelay to automate inbound patient billing calls. Healthcare providers receive large volume of calls from patients seeking clarity on their financial obligations. And the use of ConversationRelay enables AI-powered voice agents to provide quick answers and reduce wait times. This provides a better patient experience and quantifiable outcome compared to traditional chatbots. It is also said to reduce costs. The real test is whether such capabilities impact customer experience metrics, such as net promoter score (NPS).

Today, many businesses use Twilio to enhance customer engagement. At the Twilio SIGNAL Sydney event for example, Twilio customers spoke about their success with Twilio solutions. Crypto.com reduced onboarding times from hours to minutes, Lendi Group (a mortgage FinTech company) highlighted the use of AI agents to engage customers after hours, and Philippines Airlines was exploring Twilio Segment and Twilio Flex to enable personalized customer experiences. There was a general excitement with the use of AI to further enhance CX. However, while businesses are aware of the benefits of using AI to improve customer experience, the challenge has been the ability to do it effectively.

Twilio is simplifying the process with Segment and conversational AI solutions. The company is tackling another major challenge around AI security, through the acquisition of Stytch (completed on November 14, 2025), an identity platform for AI agents. AI agent authentication becomes crucial as more agents are deployed and given access to data and systems. AI agents will also collaborate autonomously through protocols such as Model Context Protocol, which can create security risks without an effective identity framework.

It has come a long way from legacy chatbots to GenAI-powered voice agents, and Twilio is not alone in pursuing AI-powered CX solutions. The market is a long way off from providing quantifiable feedback from customers. Technology vendors enabling customer engagement (e.g., Genesys, Salesforce, and Zendesk) have developed AI capabilities including voice AI agents. The collective efforts and competition within the industry will help to drive awareness and adoption. But it is crucial to get the basics right around data management, security, and cost of deploying AI.

Summary Bullets:

• Organizations are spending more on technology across business functions, and it is imperative for them to understand and optimize their tech spending through technology business management (TBM).
• IBM is a key TBM vendor helping organizations to drive their IT strategy more effectively; it is making moves to extend the solution to more customers and partners.

Every company is a tech company. While this is a cliché, especially in the tech industry, it is becoming real in the era of data and AI. For some time, businesses have been gathering data and analyzing them for insights to improve processes and develop new business models. By feeding data into AI engines, enterprises accelerate transformation by automating processes and reducing human intervention. The result is less friction in customer engagement, more agile operations, smarter decision-making, and faster time to market. This is, at least on paper, the promises of AI.

However, enterprises face challenges as they modernize their tech stack, adopt more digital solutions, and move AI from trials to production. Visibility into tech spending and the ability to forecast costs, especially with many services consumed on a pay-as-you-go basis is a challenge. While FinOps addresses cloud spend, a more holistic view of technology spend is necessary, including legacy on-premises systems, GenAI costs (pricing is typically based on the tokens), as well as labor-related costs.

This has made the concept of TBM more crucial today than ever. TBM is a discipline that focuses on enhancing business outcomes by providing organizations with a systematic approach to translating technology investments into business values. It brings financial discipline and transparency to their IT expenditures with the aim of maximizing the contribution of technology to overall business success. Technology is now widely used across business functions such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) for finance, human capital management (HCM) for HR, customer resource management (CRM) for sales, and supply chain management (SCM) for operations. Based on GlobalData’s research, about half of the tech spend today is already from budgets outside of the IT department. It is becoming more crucial as the use of technology becomes even more pervasive across the organization especially with AI being embedded into workflows. Moreover, TBM capability also help to elevate the role of tech leaders within an organization, as a strategic business partners.

IBM is one of the vendors that offer a comprehensive set of solutions to support TBM in part enabled by acquisitions such as Apptio (which also acquired Cloudability and Targetprocess) and Kubecost. Cloudability underpins IBM’s FinOps and cloud cost management, which is a key component that is already seeing great demand due to the need to optimize cloud workloads and spend as companies continue to expand their cloud usage. Apptio offers IT financial management (ITFM) which helps enterprises gain visibility into their tech spend (including SaaS, cloud, on-premises systems, labor, etc.) as well as usage and performance by app or team. This enables real-time decision-making, facilitates the assessment IT investments against KPIs, makes it possible to shift IT budget from keeping the lights on to innovation, and supports showback/chargeback to promote fairness and efficient usage of resources. With Targetprocess, IBM also has a strategic portfolio management (SPM) solution that helps organizations to plan, track, and prioritize work from the strategic portfolio of projects and products to the software development team. The ability to track work delivered by teams and determine the cost per unit of work allows organizations to improve time-to-market and align talent spend to strategic priorities.

Besides IBM, ServiceNow’s SPM helps organizations make better decision based on the initiatives to pursue based on resources, people, budgets, etc. ServiceWare is another firm that offers cloud cost management, ITFM, and a digital value model for TBM. Other FinOps and ITSM vendors may also join the fray as market awareness grows.

Moreover, TBM should not be a practice of the largest enterprises but rather depends on the level of tech spending involved. While IBM/Apptio serves many enterprises (e.g., 60% of Global Fortune 100 companies) that have tech spend well over $100 million, there are other vendors (e.g., MagicOrange and Nicus) that have more cost-effective solutions to target mid-sized enterprises. IBM is now addressing this customer segment with a streamlined IBM Apptio Essentials suite announced in June 2025 which offers fundamental building blocks of ITFM practice that can be implemented quickly and more cost-effectively. Based on GlobalData’s ICT Client Prospector database, in the US alone, there are over 5,000 businesses with total spend exceeding $25 million, which expands the addressable market for IBM.

For service providers, TBM is also a powerful solution for deeper engagement with enterprises and delivers a solution that drives tangible business outcomes. Personas interested in TBM include CIOs, CFOs, and CTOs. While there are TBM tools and dashboards that are readily available, service providers can play a role in managing the stakeholders and designing the processes. Through working with multiple enterprise customers, service providers are also building experiences and best practices to help deliver value faster and avoid potential pitfalls. Service providers such as Deloitte and Wipro already offer TBM to enterprise customers. Others should also consider working with TBM vendors to develop a similar practice.

Summary Bullets:

• Google Cloud has developed a comprehensive tech stack to help businesses embrace GenAI and agentic AI.

• There are now many examples of AI delivering commercial benefits including AI-enabled software and automation of workflow for traditional enterprises.

Google Cloud held its annual event in Sydney (Australia) recently which had a keen focus on AI and more specifically agentic AI. The event highlighted the possibilities and benefits of AI through Australian businesses that have deployed the technology commercially to improve customer experience and develop new business opportunities. While the AI models such as Google Gemini have been capturing market attention, there are many other initiatives within Google Cloud to develop capabilities to simplify the adoption of AI. The company now offers an AI-optimized technology stack, which includes the AI infrastructure, data platform, models, platforms, and AI agents and applications. This does not mean that customers are confined to Google Cloud’s tech stack. One of the key value propositions of the company has been its willingness to support hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Another is a view to work with partners on open source and decoupling architectures to avoid lock-in and pivot with new requirements in 12 to 18 months. In the case of AI, it allows businesses to connect their tools developed on Google Cloud to data and applications in other cloud environments.

In deploying AI agents, Google Cloud offers customers three options. Firstly, businesses can build their own proprietary agents through Google Vertex AI Agent Builder, which has various models (including third-party models within Google’s Model Garden), tools, and development kit. Secondly, Google Cloud offers a range of pre-built agents that can be quickly deployed (e.g., agents for customer engagement, coding, data engineering, security, content creation, etc.). Finally, the company is also giving customers access to partner agents developed by companies such as Salesforce, ServiceNow, Workday, and more.

While there are many AI projects that failed to move into production, the event showcased some examples of AI being deployed commercially and yielding business value. Global software firms are leading the pack in adoption AI as a matter of survival. As with any platform change, they stand to be disrupted the most by emerging firms who are able to harness the power of AI. Google Cloud is co-innovating with independent software vendors of different sizes to embed AI capabilities into their products. For example, graphic design software firm Canva demonstrated the adoption of Google’s video generation model Veo 3 to add video creation capability to its platform. This move has created a new feature for Canva customers, allowing them to create video content by entering a single text prompt. This can deliver dramatic productivity gains for creative agencies, marketing teams, and educators.

Heidi Health, a software company addressing the challenges of clinicians has been using AI to simplify administrative tasks and giving clinicians more time to engage patients. Heidi Health is an AI-powered medical scribe that frees up clinicians from time-consuming transcription and documentation tasks. The company has leveraged Google Cloud’s AI platform for speech-to-text capabilities, and it is looking to use other tools such as its ‘Agent Builder’ to advance its solution to become a digital health concierge that can, for example, use an AI agent to call patients for follow-up calls to check on symptoms. As a start-up without extensive resources, Heidi Health has leveraged Google Cloud’s global scale to extend its solutions to clinicians in more than 50 countries.

Traditional businesses are also pursuing AI and prioritizing use cases. Orica, a mining and infrastructure solutions provider, applies Google Cloud’s AI platform to its SAP data across its supply chain to forecast customer demand and improve demand planning. This is made possible as the company has consolidated its data to a single source and by re-platforming the SAP environment onto Google Cloud. Optus, the local telco has also launched its ‘Expert AI,’ an agentic AI solution that supports sales and service interactions. It analyzes live customer conversations across channels in real time, provides contextual guidance, summarizes insights, suggests next actions, and executes tasks across multiple backend systems to resolve customer needs. In this market segment, while Google Cloud has the tools and technology, it is working closely with partners to help enterprises achieve their transformation objectives. In the case of Orica, it has highlighted the importance of the partner ecosystem and the migration of SAP workloads from Microsoft Azure to Google Cloud was supported by partners including Accenture, Cognizant, and LTIMindtree.

The event highlights the many possibilities of agentic AI but the reality is that not every business is AI-ready. For AI agents to be capable, a business needs to have a data strategy and the ability to execute it. “Born in the cloud” companies are also more ready as well as companies that have strong digital expertise and have been modernizing their IT. Google Cloud is demonstrating the possibilities with AI but it needs partners to be ready to work with clients to overcome challenges, often due to legacy systems and mindset. Likewise, enterprise will need to also move beyond point solutions, some shared on the day, toward a mindset shift of scaling rollouts by embedding AI across multiple departments, systems, workflows, and buying journeys. While the approach takes on more risks, they provide the highest chances of high impact outcomes.