Omdia view
Summary
In the telecom software space, the standout topics at MWC 2025 in Barcelona were the rapid pace of change surrounding AI – whether agentic AI, generative AI (GenAI), or predictive AI – as well as autonomous networks and network APIs.
The increasing complexity of the telecom technology ecosystem means that, more than ever, MWC is being used to demonstrate partnerships. As such, several participants had a presence across multiple partner booths, as well as their own. This applies as much to telecom operators as to vendors.
Continuing AI momentum
This year’s MWC saw continuing momentum around AI-driven network automation and customer-facing AI use cases. As a Microsoft executive we met put it: “Operators are not normally early adopters, so we have been shocked how quickly telcos have been adopting GenAI.”
We saw many AI-related demos, use cases, and tie-ups between telcos and AI tech vendors. AI-for-RAN, AI-and-RAN and AI-on-RAN were also hot topics at this year’s event, which are explored in detail in MWC 2025 takeaways: Radio access networks (see Further reading).
Industry-specific large language models (LLMs) figured in several discussions at the conference. The GSMA announced the launch of a new open-source initiative – Open-Telco LLM Benchmarks – which aims to create a new framework to improve the performance of AI models for telecom-specific applications.
The GLOMO Awards are a useful indicator of what is hot. A Telecom Foundation Model-based entry was the winner of the Best Network Software Breakthrough category, of which I was a judge. The model is being used to support role-based copilots and scenario-specific agents that address a range of operations, network optimization, and user experience use cases. Most of the submissions for Best Network Software Breakthrough were focused on leveraging AI for network automation.
Public cloud in the driving seat of telco AI
Every year it seems that the role of the hyperscalers in the telco AI ecosystem is expanding, driven by a powerful mix of AI innovation and AI-optimized cloud infrastructure. A selection of AI and automation-related announcements by cloud players at MWC 2025 included those from AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.
AWS
- AWS announced the launch of Wim, a Mexican cloud native digital mobile network operator, which employs a wide range of AWS AI and GenAI capabilities to support its network, deliver personalization, and enable subscribers to customize its service via a user-friendly app.
- AWS announced the signing of a global cloud infrastructure and GenAI deal with Proximus Group to streamline and expand the telco provider’s services.
Google Cloud
- Some of the telco partnerships highlighted by Google included helping to automate detection and resolution of network issues at Bell Canada, and using Gemini 2.0 to develop an AI agent call RAN Guardian for Deutsche Telekom.
- It also announced an expanded partnership with Salesforce, with Agentforce leveraging Google Cloud’s Vertex AI and Gemini capabilities, as well as tighter integration with Google Customer Engagement Suite to deliver AI-enabled contact center capabilities.
Microsoft Azure
- Microsoft announced that Nokia is using the Azure AI Foundry and Azure Open AI Service to develop a network operations copilot.
- Case studies were also shared of how telcos such as Telkomsel, Vodafone, and Lumen are leveraging its AI technologies, including Microsoft 365 Copilot, to automate and improve customer engagement.
Agentic AI crops up everywhere
A lot of attention at this year’s event was devoted to the growing role of agentic AI. Vendors were all claiming to be incorporating AI agents into their telco software solutions as an additional layer or user interface. However, it was not always clear from the demos whether agentic AI was just managing basic tasks or operating at a more advanced level involving multistep reasoning.
While agentic AI leverages LLM capabilities, these are augmented by several supportive technologies and methodologies, such as a sense of memory, self-reflection, and tool use. Together, these allow agentic AI systems to operate with greater autonomy.
AI agents can complement each other within a multi-agent framework, provided that there is a robust orchestration layer supporting it. This allows agents to work collaboratively across applications and accomplish complex tasks without the need for explicit programming.
Agentic AI could potentially have a revolutionary impact on the telco IT industry. However, at this stage, what we saw in Barcelona appeared to be limited in scope. Nevertheless, vendors are keen to weave agentic AI into their demos and presentations and it will remain a focus of their messaging this year.
The following is a selection of agentic AI-related announcements:
- Nokia announced that it had added agentic AI capabilities across its autonomous networks portfolio. These support several new security features in its NetGuard Cybersecurity Dome, including a new AI-powered Threat Hunt Assistant that shortens threat detection times by proactively detecting cybersecurity attacks. Nokia also announced new agentic AI innovations associated with its Nokia Data Suite and Nokia Digital Operations Center.
- Ericsson announced a collaboration with Telenor to produce a proof of concept for an agentic AI system that cuts RAN energy use. The system learns to optimize capacity and power as part of the network management process.
- Amdocs made several announcements in connection with its Amdocs amAIz telco intelligence suite, embedding more AI capabilities across its Customer Experience Suite (CES) portfolio.
- Netcracker presented its GenAI agentic-driven customer engagement demo. According to Netcracker, agentic technology can make AI more proactive in the assistance it provides to customer care agents.
- Salesforce announced the launch of the Agentforce 2dx, the newest version of its Agentforce platform, which makes use of agentic AI and autonomous AI agents across a range of processes.
Industry initiative to promote L4 highly autonomous networks
Autonomous networks were another strong theme at MWC 2025, a focal point of which was the TM Forum-sponsored Autonomous Networks Summit. The event saw the launch of a TM Forum “L4 is On” industry initiative to help accelerate the shift to Level 4 (high autonomy) autonomous networks.
There was a lot of optimism over what the founding members believe can be achieved over the next 12 months, although achieving these goals will be a big ask given where most telco are today. According to Omdia’s Telco Network Automation Survey Report ‒ 2024 (see Further reading), most CSPs are currently at Level 2 (partial autonomy) or are transitioning to Level 3 (conditional autonomy), so automation still typically focuses on specific network areas such as RAN, transport, or core, and humans are still responsible for cross-domain decisions.
To achieve self-healing and self-optimization, there is a need for intent-driven automation to translate business objectives into real-time network actions. There will also be a need for digital twin simulations and advanced AI capabilities including copilots and agents to support human operatives.
Open Gateway and network API initiatives continue to mature
As the GSMA Open Gateway initiative evolves, we are seeing an increasing range of network API announcements, use cases, and demos, as well as several new alliances. Events such as the Open Gateway Devcon helped to drum up excitement, as did the GSMA Open Gateway Zone at MWC 2025, where more than 30 companies were partnering in the demos.
It is clearly in the GSMA’s interest to demonstrate that strong progress has been made since the launch of the Open Gateway initiative two years ago. As such, in his opening speech, the GSMA director general, Mats Granryd, emphasized the progress Open Gateway has made. Open Gateway now claims to have 47 mobile operator groups as members, representing 239 mobile operators and 65% of global connections. A total of 94 APIs are now commercially available to developers around the world.
New members continue to join the Open Gateway initiative. It also benefits from the continued support of the public cloud providers AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, as well as aggregators such as Aduna and Nokia, and communications-platform-as-a-service (CPaaS) companies such as Infobip and Vonage. In their pre-MWC activities, both Ericsson (which owns 50% of the Aduna joint venture) and Nokia (which has its own Network as Code platform) emphasized the importance of network APIs.
There was a plethora of announcements related to Open Gateway before and during MWC, with Aduna featuring heavily in many of these. Among the operators, Telefónica was particularly active with its messaging. One announcement from the Spanish incumbent that caught our attention was its partnership with Google for number verification. Telefónica chose to go directly to Google for this deal, rather than going through Aduna, and the announcement mentions that “other operators including AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, T-Mobile, and Telenor are also working on enabling this service, and more are expected to join in the coming months.” This suggests that despite the swathe of announcements made by Aduna, it does not have the monopoly on all CSP network API initiatives.
Selected announcements are shown in Table 1.
Table 1: Selected Open Gateway-related announcements from MWC 2025
|
Organization |
Announcement |
|
Aduna |
Aduna announced a partnership with the Bridge Alliance that will allow it to expand its reach in Asia Pacific, making use of the Bridge Alliance API Exchange (BAEx) that was launched last year. It also announced a strategic partnership with CPaaS providers Sinch and Infobip. French operators Bouygues Telecom and Free (iliad Group) were the latest to join the Aduna initiative, following an announcement in the run up to MWC Barcelona that KDDI had also joined, and that AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon were delivering network APIs for number verification and SIM swap. |
|
GSMA |
GSMA announced network API partnerships involving Spanish operators Orange, Telefónica, and Vodafone; US operators AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon; South African operators Cell C, MTN, and Telkom; Indonesian operators Telkomsel, Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison, XL Axiata, and Smartfren; Chinese operators China Mobile, China Telecom, and China Unicom; as well as French operators Bouygues Telecom, Free, Orange, and SFR. |
|
Nokia |
Nokia announced that Proximus Global would be using Nokia’s Network Exposure Platform and its Enterprise API Hub, which, along with recent announcements about Globe Telecom and Deutsche Telekom, means that Nokia now has 55 partners in its Network as Code ecosystem. |
|
Telefónica |
Telefónica announced a partnership with Google Cloud to integrate network API authentication solutions into Google Firebase in 2025. Google Firebase is a popular backend software development platform that provides easy-to-use software development kits (SDKs) for authentication, among other services. For more detail on this see Google Firebase and Telefónica boost Number Verification API despite clunky consent (see Further reading). It also announced an extension of its collaboration with Microsoft to co-develop digital solutions using Open Gateway. Both companies will work together to migrate the capacities of Kernel, Telefónica’s AI platform, to Azure. The collaboration will include a joint go-to-market strategy to make a range of digital products and services available on Azure Marketplace and integrated into Microsoft’s telecom solutions. It announced the launch of an innovation center with AWS for the creation of SaaS products for telecoms based on Open Gateway APIs. |
|
MEF |
MEF announced a new network-as-a-service (NaaS) API that leverages open-source CAMARA APIs. Together with Colt and Orange it demoed a quality-on-demand (QoD) use case that enables real-time, automated network interactions across both mobile and fixed-line networks. |
Source: Omdia
Open Gateway, Aduna, Nokia Network as Code, and Telefónica all had a strong presence at this year’s event, but the role of the public cloud providers in the network API ecosystem is continuing to expand. They may be only one of the three go-to-market channels cited by Open Gateway – the other two being resellers and the enterprise divisions of the operators themselves – but the big cloud providers have the scale and existing developer relationships to drive this market forward. As we saw from the Google Cloud and Telefónica partnership mentioned above, the cloud players are large enough to work directly with individual telcos. Google in particular is already directly connected with over 100 operators, having made RCS the default messaging system on most Android phones.
From verification to QoD
So far, user authentication and fraud prevention have been the most popular use cases for CAMARA APIs. Verification of user identity and age will continue to be important use cases, but we expect to see more QoD use cases in the coming years, and sophisticated use cases that integrate multiple network APIs.
The Open Gateway category of the GLOMO Awards this year were mostly financial use cases, but also included some QoD use cases to enable safe drone flights, autonomous driving, robotics, and online gaming. For example, in the GSMA Open Gateway zone it was possible to remotely drive a car located in Finland.
There were also several QoD-related announcements by CSPs. For example, Telefónica is using these APIs to support service-based slicing. Another announcement involved the German operators Deutsche Telekom, O2 Telefónica, and Vodafone, working with Siemens Energy. However, the commercialization of QoD APIs is still at an early stage and the regulatory rules surrounding them are still unclear in some countries.
We saw many examples of integrated applications making use of multiple network API capabilities in innovative ways to serve industry verticals or niche consumer needs. The shortlist for the Open Gateway Global Use Case Innovation Challenge that I helped to judge, included autonomous driving and drone use cases, as well as one based around a virtual Global Marathon.
One of my favorite network API use cases was a Nokia Network on Demand energy efficiency demo on the Google Cloud stand, which used a range of network APIs to support a customer app that encourages sustainable behavior, as well as helping the operator to better manage congestion.
Appendix
Further reading
“MWC 2025 takeaways: Radio access networks” (March 2025)
“Google Firebase and Telefónica boost Number Verification API despite clunky consent” (March 2025)
Vodafone’s Network API Strategy (February 2025)
“How Vodafone Business is leveraging AI to create business value, not hype” (February 2025)
“CAMARA to streamline consent management for network APIs” (January 2025)
“How GenAI will transform BSS/OSS” (October 2024)
Telco Network Automation Survey Report – 2024 (October 2024)
Author
Kris Szaniawski, Chief Analyst, Service and Network Evolution
