Featured Partner Blog: By Laurent Philonenko, Board Member, Metafore.ai
In the first of a new series, we hear from our partners at Metafore.ai, part of our GSMA Services Partnership Programme about the changing role of AI in Telecoms:
Every industry eventually reaches a moment when the tools that once accelerated progress begin to hold it back. Telecom is living that moment right now.
For years, operators have invested heavily in AI — wisely, aggressively, and with the clear intent to modernize. Yet the returns have not matched the investment. Not because the technology is flawed, but because the architectures surrounding it were built for a different era.
In addition to my background in network management and SS7-based intelligent networks, I’ve spent three decades at the intersection of customer experience and enterprise technology — as CEO of Genesys and Servion, CTO at Cisco and Avaya, and as someone who launched one of the industry’s first AI-powered contact center solutions back in 2018. I’ve watched every generation of platform promise to unify operations, and I’ve led the teams that built many of them. One thing has become unmistakably clear: AI is evolving faster than the systems meant to coordinate it.
The result? Intelligence everywhere — but alignment nowhere.
A new strategic reality
Inside every major operator, AI agents are making decisions every second. They optimize network routes, detect fraud, guide support agents, score churn risk, and streamline billing. Individually, these systems are impressive. Collectively, they are fragmented.
This fragmentation isn’t a technical inconvenience. It’s a leadership issue — because it determines whether AI becomes a strategic advantage or structural liability.
The question leaders must now ask is simple: Are our AI systems operating as a company-wide intelligence, or as a series of unconnected tools?
The next phase of telecom intelligence
The next generation of competitive advantage will come from orchestration — from enabling AI systems to understand the same context and act toward shared outcomes.
When intelligence becomes collective rather than isolated, everything changes:
A network event doesn’t trigger only a technical response; it prompts customer care, retention planning, and proactive communication. A billing interaction doesn’t stay inside billing; it reshapes next-best actions across service and commercial teams. A churn risk doesn’t remain a score; it becomes a coordinated, multi-agent response.
This is what it means for AI to operate as an enterprise-wide system rather than a set of disconnected capabilities.
Why telcos are uniquely positioned to lead
Telcos run some of the most complex, data-rich environments in the world. Few industries generate more real-time telemetry across infrastructure, customers, and operations.
This makes telcos uniquely capable of leveraging orchestrated intelligence — but only with the right leadership framing.
Executives must begin thinking not in terms of deployments, but in terms of alignment. Not in terms of more AI, but in terms of coordinated AI.
Because the real opportunity is not adding intelligence. It’s connecting it.
Why Metafore?
I helped build the CRM and contact center systems that shaped telecom operations for decades — at Genesys, at Cisco, at Avaya. Those platforms were engineered for a human-driven world, a world where information flowed linearly, and decisions moved through organizational layers.
But AI doesn’t operate in layers. It operates in parallel.
The architectures of the past were not built to support machine-to-machine coordination and expecting them to do so places a ceiling on what operators can achieve. I’ve seen this ceiling firsthand at every company I’ve led — the moment when point solutions hit diminishing returns because nothing connects them.
That’s why I decided to help build Metafore. We built Metafore to remove that ceiling — to give AI systems a shared operational foundation so that every model, every agent, and every environment strengthens the others instead of operating alone. It’s the architecture I wished I’d had when I was running these businesses.
A call to leadership
Telecom is entering a new era — one where differentiation won’t come from who has the most AI, but from who coordinates it best.
The operators who lead this shift will redefine customer experience, operational efficiency, and enterprise intelligence. They will run anticipatory businesses, not reactive ones. And they will operate with a coherence that competitors will struggle to match.
This is the future I believe in, and the one we are building.
If you’re attending MWC Barcelona, we’d welcome the conversation. You’ll find us at Hall 4, Stand F30, and South Village, SV.12.