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Wavelo's Michelle Nowak highlights the important commercial role of service assurance in a Catalyst project focusing on the Internet of Moving Things.
Michelle A. Nowak
How the Autonomous IoMT Catalyst helps CSPs monetize intelligence
There's a version of this story that's easy to tell. Drones are proliferating. Autonomous vehicles are being tested on public roads. Delivery robots are navigating city streets. The Internet of Moving Things (IoMT) is here, and it's generating enormous demand for 5G connectivity.
But that version of the story misses the harder and more interesting question: What does it actually take to serve a world of moving, autonomous, mission-critical devices – not just to carry their traffic but to orchestrate their operations, guarantee their service levels and build commercially viable offerings around them?
That's the question TM Forum’s Phase III Catalyst — Autonomous and Sustainable Moving IoT Ecosystems at Scale was designed to answer. As a participant, Wavelo brought agentic service assurance, a capability that sits at the heart of what makes the latest phase of the project possible.
The earlier phases of this Catalyst laid important groundwork, demonstrating that autonomous moving IoT orchestration is technically achievable and that AI can manage connectivity for moving assets in ways that legacy network management could not.
Phase II tackled the next logical step: commercialization. Technical proof-of-concept and commercial readiness are very different problems. A capability that works in a controlled demonstration needs to be packageable, priceable, and scalable before it becomes a business.
Phase III, which was demonstrated recently at DTW Ignite, was explicitly designed to close that gap by prototyping monetizable service models such as corridor-based licensing, mission-based pricing and AI insights-as-a-service, while also expanding the solution beyond drones to cover autonomous vehicles, delivery bots, robotics and mobile industrial assets across industries including logistics, smart cities, utilities, public safety and agriculture.
The aim across all the phases of the project has been to help CSPs move from selling connectivity to becoming orchestrators of intelligent, sustainable IoT ecosystems.
The operational challenges of the IoMT place unique demands on modern networks. Whether it is a drone surveying utility lines or an autonomous vehicle, devices are not only using bandwidth, they are performing tasks that must be maintained in real time to avoid failure.
Standard network assurance protocols are ill-equipped for these requirements, as they were designed for static workloads where issues are addressed over minutes or hours. In the context of IoMT, however, responses must occur within milliseconds.
To address this, a new approach to assurance is required – one that can:
Agentic assurance can meet these needs by shifting from a reactive to an anticipatory model. It moves beyond managing isolated service and network elements to understanding their collective role in achieving specific operational goals. By enabling autonomous, closed-loop remediation, agentic assurance ensures the service and network remain continuously aligned with the original intent defined by the enterprise.
One of Phase III's most significant contributions is its integration of generative AI (GenAI), AI‑native service assurance, and AIOps intent generation and what-if simulation into the operational workflow.
Intent-based networking has been discussed in the industry for years. The idea – that an enterprise should be able to express what it needs the network to achieve, rather than specifying how – is brilliant. But making it work in practice across a fleet of autonomous devices with varying mission profiles, is a different matter entirely.
Phase III prototyped IoMT, demonstrating the power of AI at the edge. An enterprise deploying drone inspection corridors doesn't want to configure network slices. It wants to say: These missions require sub-20ms latency, 99.99% uptime and carbon-optimized routing — and have the platform handle everything else. Agentic assurance provides the service intelligence layer that makes this possible, translating high-level intent into real-time device behavior, monitoring compliance continuously, detecting anomalies and enforcing service level agreements (SLAs) through closed-loop automation.
The addition of the what-if simulation takes this further, enabling CSPs and their enterprise customers to model how different network conditions, mission profiles or routing decisions would affect outcomes before committing to them. It's the kind of capability that turns a connectivity contract into a strategic partnership.
Phase III of the Catalyst also showcased one of the more underappreciated dimensions of the IoMT opportunity: sustainability.
Enterprises are increasingly accountable for their own sustainability commitments, and their network partners are part of that picture. The Catalyst incorporates real-time sustainability insights, enabling carbon-aware routing and energy-optimized mission planning, but more importantly, verifiable ESG-aligned reporting tied directly to operational data.
A green SLA backed by real operational telemetry is a meaningfully different product than a sustainability claim in a vendor brochure. For CSPs looking to differentiate on more than price, the ability to offer sustainability-as-a-service with auditable proof is a genuine competitive advantage.
What made Phase III worth watching at DTW wasn't any single capability in isolation. It was the combination: network, telemetry and sustainability insights with predictive AI, intent-driven AI, multi-device scalability, and AI-powered insights as a service for 5G value creation with monetization – all unified through TM Forum Open APIs and components aligned with the Open Digital Architecture into a single commercially viable architecture.
The Autonomous IoMT Catalyst has accelerated participants’ contributions back to the TM Forum Collaboration Community. The project’s work on event‑driven architecture (EDA) and Async API guidelines and standards is particularly significant because it creates the connective tissue between technical capability and commercial packaging – enabling interoperable, event‑driven operations across digital ecosystems.
The IoMT market isn’t waiting – the enterprises deploying drones, autonomous vehicles and mobile robots today are making infrastructure decisions now. The CSPs that can offer mission assurance, not just bandwidth or signal coverage, will be the ones that earn long-term opportunities in these verticals.
Phase III of the Autonomous IoMT Catalyst was designed to give operators a concrete, deployable path forward. It has proven the technology and prototyped the commercial models. And it has done both within a TM Forum-aligned framework that makes adoption achievable rather than aspirational.
The 5G network has long been viewed as infrastructure – pipes for bandwidth. This Catalyst shows something far more powerful: When that infrastructure becomes intelligent, autonomous and accountable, it transforms into a mission partner for the enterprises building the world of moving things.
Autonomous, AI‑powered IoMT networks at scale turn every mobile device event into new top‑line revenue, while predictive AI at the edge intelligence and sustainable orchestration deliver greener, leaner operations to the bottom line.
