Mohamed Awais – Telco & AI Infrastructure Advisor has released a new telecom AI analysis covering ontology, contextual and agentic AI, and evolving telecom architecture beyond digital transformation. The analysis targets telecom executives, architects, AI leaders, vendors, and cloud and system integrators in transformation.
— New analysis highlights the architectural gap limiting AI at scale and introduces ontology-driven models as the next phase of telecom transformation
May 2026 — Mohamed Awais, Telco & AI Infrastructure Advisor and a senior enterprise and solution architect with more than 20 years of experience across global telecom environments, has released a new telecom AI industry analysis examining scaling challenges facing agentic AI across complex telecom environments despite significant investment in digital transformation, TM Forum APIs, and AI-driven automation.
Over the past decade, telecom operators have made substantial progress in digital transformation. Architectures have evolved to include TM Forum Open APIs, microservices-based middleware, API gateways, and large-scale data platforms. These advances have improved interoperability, accelerated integration, and increased agility across OSS, BSS, and network domains.
However, Awais argues that while these changes have modernised how systems connect, they have not fundamentally changed how systems understand each other.
“We’ve modernised telecom plumbing, but not telecom intelligence.”
This distinction is central to the problem. Modern telecom environments are highly integrated but remain fragmented in how data, relationships, and business logic are structured. Middleware layers originally introduced for integration have evolved into complex orchestration engines responsible for workflows, identity resolution, and business rules. In many organisations, middleware now functions as the operational “brain.”
Yet that “brain” is distributed, embedded in code, and fragmented across systems.
“TMF APIs and microservices improved how systems connect, but not how they understand each other.”
As a result, while systems are connected, they do not share a consistent understanding of customers, services, products, and network elements. This becomes a critical limitation when introducing AI into the environment.
Across the industry, operators are investing heavily in AI, particularly agentic AI capable of planning, executing tasks, and interacting with APIs. While early pilots have shown promise, many organisations continue to face challenges scaling these capabilities into production environments with measurable impact.
Awais contends the issue is not the capability of AI, but the lack of context in which it operates.
“AI isn’t failing in telecom—the architecture underneath it is.”
Agentic AI can access data and invoke APIs, but it does not inherently understand the relationships between entities in telecom environments. Customers, accounts, subscribers, devices, services, and products are connected in complex, multi-layered ways that are often defined differently across OSS, BSS, and network systems.
Without a unified model of these relationships, AI systems are forced to infer meaning.
“Without context, AI doesn’t make decisions—it makes guesses.”
This lack of grounding leads to inconsistent outputs, incorrect decisions, and unreliable automation across complex telecom environments. AI may perform well in isolated use cases, but its limitations become evident when operating across cross-domain telecom systems.
“Agentic AI can act, but in telecom today it’s acting blind.”
The consequence is inefficiency. Each new AI initiative frequently requires redefining the same business context, including mapping relationships between customers, services, and products, resulting in duplication of effort and limited scalability.
To address this challenge, Awais introduces ontology-driven architecture as a critical next step.
“If agentic AI is the execution layer, ontology is the brain.”
Ontology provides a structured and shared representation of telecom entities and their relationships, defining how customers, subscribers, devices, services, and products connect within a unified model. Rather than embedding business logic across middleware and code, ontology centralises understanding into a single, accessible framework.
“Telcos don’t lack data—they lack a unified, accessible model of how everything connects.”
With this foundation, AI systems gain the context required to reason across domains rather than simply execute isolated tasks. The result is more reliable automation, consistent decision-making, and the ability to scale AI initiatives without repeatedly rebuilding business logic.
This approach also strengthens governance. Instead of policies and rules being distributed and opaque, they become explicit, centralised, and auditable, enabling AI to operate within clearly defined boundaries while improving compliance and operational visibility.
Beyond technical benefits, the analysis outlines the commercial implications of contextual, ontology-driven AI. These include dynamic pricing, real-time monetisation, hyper-personalised customer experiences, and faster product innovation cycles.
“The real opportunity isn’t just cost reduction—it’s revenue velocity.”
This shift enables telecom operators to move from static, reactive models to adaptive, intelligent systems capable of responding to demand in near real time.
At the same time, the broader infrastructure landscape is evolving. Telecom operators are increasingly positioned to participate in emerging AI ecosystems, particularly in areas such as sovereign AI, where connectivity, regulatory alignment, and geographic reach provide a strategic advantage. Awais notes that without addressing underlying architectural constraints, these opportunities may remain underutilised.
“The winners won’t be those with the most AI tools, but those with the best structured intelligence.”
The analysis challenges the assumption that adopting more AI tools will automatically deliver better outcomes. Instead, it positions architecture, context, and structured understanding as the primary enablers of scalable AI in telecom.
“We don’t need more AI in telecom; we need a better structure for it to operate.”
The analysis is particularly relevant for CTOs, CIOs, enterprise architects, AI and data leaders, and transformation programme directors within telecom operators, as well as vendors and system integrators supporting telecom ecosystems.
The full telecom AI analysis is available at:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-ai-struggling-telco-what-needs-change-mohamed-awais-nktmf
Contact Info:
Name: Mohamed Awais
Email: Send Email
Organization: Findrez
Address: Sheikh Zayed Road – Emirates Tower, Dubai, إمارة دبيّ, United Arab Emirates
Phone: +971-4-319-7659
Website: http://www.findrez.com/marketing
Source: NewsNetwork
Release ID: 89190723
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