- TM Forum isn't known as a fast-moving organization, but its leaders feel the pressure of AI
- Meanwhile, hyperscalers are moving faster than ever posing an existential threat to telecom
- Despite an identity crisis, there are lots of attendees at this week's TM Forum event
DTW IGNITE, COPENHAGEN — The leaders of the TM Forum today surprised with some self-deprecating comments at the event’s opening keynotes. And some of their comments left the audience feeling as if the group is experiencing a major identity crisis with the advent of AI.
The TM Forum has always been a rather slow-moving standards group seen as the opposite of the rapid-pace, open-source groups that started in Silicon Valley. But now, AI is taking the world by storm, and TM Forum leaders are grappling with that reality, while at the same time they still seem nostalgic for slower times.
“As an industry we haven’t historically been the quickest to adopt new technology," TM Forum CEO Nik Willetts said. "As we enter this age of agentic AI, we need to build foundations that will allow us to do this across our industry.”
He said the group can help its members use AI to build new experience fabrics, “But none of this works without a mindset built for change,” said Willetts. “It’s time to break through the old ways of thinking. How can we deliver working code in production, not just more paper?”
But then, he seemed to contradict himself, saying, “To use AI at scale, we need to move beyond this period of Wild West experimenting.”
Willetts mentioned that it’s been two years since the TM Forum issued a “code red.”
Fierce Network asked Ashish Surti, Colt Technology Services chief digital and information officer, what the code red reference was all about. He said it was a call to the industry about some major concerns for the future: that its margins are being eroded, that connectivity products are being commoditized and that telcos are unable to show value to their customers.
Has the telecom industry been able to make any major pivots since TM Forum issued its code red?
Perhaps not.
Hyperscale headache
Surti said the real money in communications is being made by companies such as Google, Facebook and AWS, to name a few. Not only are the hyperscalers reaping massive profits with their applications that run on the connectivity provided by service providers, but Surti indicated there’s an even more dire threat: these hyperscalers are building so much infrastructure they’re practically becoming service providers themselves.
These web-scale companies have massive bandwidth between all their global data centers. “They’re telling their customers, ‘Just connect to us, and we’ll route the traffic around to our different data centers,’” according to Surti.
He said the hyperscalers used to come to telecom companies asking for managed network services. Then they handled that for themselves, but they still wanted the connectivity. Now, they may not even want that.
Time truly is of the essence for the telecom industry to adopt AI and figure out ways to monetize applications on their networks.
Steffen Roehn, chairman of the TM Forum, said today, “I’m blown away by the pace of technology adoption. How can we be faster as a forum?” But he added, “We are trying to be as concrete as the real-world challenges of our members. We need to have production of code. PDFs on standards will not bring us anywhere.”
Catch all of our coverage from this year's DTW Ignite show here.