How agentic AI and digital twins are reshaping telecom growth

Fahri Kerçek is Director of Product Management &Strategy at Etiya. He discusses how the telecom industry is redefining business models, decision-making, and growth in the age of autonomy.

TM Forum: DTW Ignite is focusing on realizing “The Future. Faster” in 2026. How does this align with your own strategic focus? 

FK: The “Future. Faster.” theme perfectly captures the profound transformation the telecom industry is undergoing today. Operators have moved beyond the scope of mere digitization or operational efficiency. The defining challenge now is agility: making intelligent decisions faster, and translating customer and operational signals into measurable, real-time business outcomes.

At Etiya, our strategic focus is on enabling this shift through our autonomous BSS and agentic growth platform. By seamlessly combining digital twin technology, agentic AI, and autonomous execution, we empower operators to transition toward highly intelligent, adaptive, and continuously evolving business operations.

Ultimately, “Future. Faster.” is more than just an event theme; it represents the next operating model for the entire industry.

TM Forum: AI has become one of the industry’s most important strategic priorities, yet much of the conversation remains centered on automation and operational efficiency. Has the industry underestimated AI’s potential to drive growth?

FK: Many AI initiatives today focus on optimizing individual processes, reducing operational effort, or improving efficiency metrics. While these are valuable outcomes, they often remain confined to specific functions and fail to influence broader business performance.

At Etiya, we believe AI should operate at a business level rather than a task level. This is why we have evolved our approach toward an agentic growth platform. Our goal is to enable systems that can continuously understand business context, identify opportunities, evaluate potential outcomes, and orchestrate actions across the organization.

In our view, the next phase of AI adoption will not be defined by how many tasks are automated, but by how effectively organizations can convert intelligence into measurable business growth.

TM Forum: What are the key technology foundations required to enable truly autonomous BSS?

FK: True autonomy requires more than automation. It requires a technology foundation capable of understanding business context, reasoning on that intelligence, and autonomously executing actions across the enterprise.

At Etiya, we believe three foundational capabilities make this possible: Digital twin technology, agentic AI, and a composable cloud-native architecture.

This is where digital twin technology becomes critical. By creating a real-time model of customers, products, channels, processes, business relationships, and operational dynamics, operators gain a unified view of their entire operating environment.

Drawing insights from customer behaviors, interactions, preferences, network usage, commercial performance, and operational data, the digital twin provides a deep understanding of customer intent, propensity, lifetime value, churn risk, and next-best opportunities. This digital twin-driven intelligence enables operators to move beyond static analytics and traditional AI models toward predictive and prescriptive decision-making that evolves with every interaction.

Agentic AI then leverages this intelligence to reason, simulate possible outcomes, and orchestrate decisions across multiple domains. Powered by digital twin intelligence, autonomous business agents can identify, predict, and act on growth opportunities, driving acquisition, upsell, retention, and customer value growth. Rather than operating through predefined workflows alone, agentic AI evaluates business conditions in real time, coordinates decisions across commercial and operational domains, and dynamically aligns actions with business objectives.

Digital twin provides awareness. Agentic AI provides reasoning. A composable cloud-native architecture provides execution.

Together, they create the foundation for autonomous BSS. Open APIs, modular services, event-driven orchestration, and scalable execution layers enable autonomous decisions to be operationalized across customer, product, revenue, and service domains without introducing additional complexity.

The result is an environment where decisions become context-aware, outcome-driven, and executable across business domains. Operators gain the ability to anticipate change, align actions with business objectives, and autonomously execute the next best action at scale.

TM Forum: Beyond operational efficiency, what business value can operators expect from autonomous BSS?

FK: Historically, BSS platforms have been measured by their ability to support operations efficiently. We believe the next generation of BSS platforms will be measured by their contribution to business growth.

By combining autonomous BSS capabilities with agentic AI and digital twin technology, operators can move beyond reactive decision-making to proactive decision intelligence powered by continuously evolving customer, operational, and commercial signals. This includes identifying upsell opportunities, improving customer retention, accelerating product adoption, and enhancing customer lifetime value.

As markets become more dynamic, growth increasingly depends on an organization’s ability to sense change, make decisions, and act quickly. We see autonomous BSS as the operational foundation that enables this agility, while the agentic growth platform provides the intelligence layer that continuously drives business value.

TM Forum: Etiya is participating in two Catalyst projects this year. Can you explain what they are about?

FK: At DTW Ignite, Etiya is contributing to two Catalyst initiatives that explore how AI, operational intelligence, and autonomous decision-making can reshape telecom operations and service innovation.

One of the Catalysts, Agentic AI-driven Billing Dispute Resolution, focuses on transforming how operators manage billing disputes through AI-powered operational intelligence. Today, these processes often rely on fragmented systems and manual investigations, leading to slow and inconsistent resolution cycles. The project demonstrates how AI agents, combined with a digital twin of customer capabilities, can analyze customer, billing, and service signals in real time to support faster, more contextual, and more accurate dispute resolution outcomes.

The second initiative, GAME-X Phase II, explores how operators can evolve beyond traditional connectivity by participating in the emerging AI economy. The Catalyst focuses on translating enterprise intent into dynamically orchestrated services across network, compute, and platform environments

Within this initiative, Etiya contributes its ODA-aligned BSS portfolio, agentic AI capabilities, and digital twin intelligence to help bridge enterprise demand with operational execution, enabling more adaptive, personalized, and value-driven digital service experiences.

Both Catalyst initiatives strongly reflect Etiya’s broader vision around autonomous BSS and the agentic growth platform—where digital twin intelligence, agentic AI, and autonomous execution capabilities come together to help operators move from reactive operations toward continuously adaptive and growth-oriented business models.