Reinventing IT for the AI era

The term reinvention is starting to be used in the telecoms industry to describe the next stage of digital transformation, with AI at the heart of communications service providers’ (CSPs’) future strategies. IT reinvention, in particular, has emerged as a focus and strategy largely because of the new capabilities enabled by AI. Agentic AI, for example, opens up the potential to address some of the roadblocks that CSPs have encountered on their transformation journeys, driving as it does greater automation in networks.

For this report we surveyed 216 IT executives from 111 operators in 72 countries about the status of their digital and AI transformation journeys. There was excellent participation from IT leaders, with 33 respondents identifying themselves as C-suite. The survey also garnered responses from practitioners both in network architecture and in software engineering roles.

Our research assesses the transformational potential of AI and explains why IT reinvention is essential for CSPs in the age of generative and agentic AI. And we find out what executives at the heart of transformations think and how they see the future of these projects.

Among the findings, customer experience transformation remains the most important single strategic goal of CSPs’ IT organizations. And half the IT leaders in our survey cite “the lack of clear, aligned vision and goals” and “culture and organizational issues” as major obstacles to transformation.

Read the report to learn:

• Why IT needs to be reinvented in order to fully embrace AI and deliver new services
• The business context that underpins the need for CSPs to reinvent IT
• Where operators are in their digital transformation projects and how these projects are evolving
• How software engineering and architectures are changing in the face of the onward march of AI
• The evolving relationships between CSPs and their technology partners as AI impacts IT.