TM Forum’s flagship telecom gathering ran under the banner “The Future. Faster.” — and this year the industry came with receipts. Here’s CPaaSAA’s read on what Copenhagen told us.
CPaaSAA spent the last week of June in Copenhagen for DTW Ignite (23–25 June) — TM Forum’s flagship event. It isn’t the industry’s biggest gathering; MWC still owns that. But it may be its most consequential internal one: where the people who actually run and transform telco networks and operations come to compare notes. It capped a busy first half of the year that took us from MWC in February through Enterprise Connect and a five-city roadshow. This is a telco stage, not a CPaaS one — but where the telecom stack goes next shapes the ground everyone else builds on.
The mandate — and the receipts
TM Forum framed the week around a single mandate — “The Future. Faster.” — and built the agenda around three Mission Summits: Trustworthy AI and Data, Autonomous Networks, and Composable IT and Ecosystems. The subtext was unmistakable. After years of AI proofs-of-concept that were always “twelve months from real impact,” the industry arrived under pressure to show measurable value.
As BT Business CTO Colin Bannon put it, the event felt like a tipping point — telecom moving away from abstract AI roadmaps toward code-proven execution, deployment and monetization. That is a discipline CPaaSAA has argued for since day one: the question is never the technology, it’s the job to be done.
Three reads from the floor
Three reads stood out — our interpretation, not the official pillars, though they map closely onto them.
From “what if” to “how.” The most telling shift wasn’t a product; it was the language. Operators and platforms have stopped asking whether AI matters and started asking where the intelligence runs, who governs it, and who packages it for the enterprise. Google Cloud’s Sridhar Gollapudi caught it well: the industry has moved past the “what if” into the “how” — how to scale, secure and operate autonomously — toward what he called the Agentic Telco. The model is commoditising; the orchestration layer above it is where the margin now sits.
Value finally showed up — with numbers attached. For once the AI story wasn’t a year away. Operators put hard targets on the table — in Gollapudi’s account, Nokia aiming for a ~30% reduction in mean-time-to-repair, AT&T citing 91% accuracy from fine-tuning — and Autonomous Networks was the largest showcase on the floor, with real results in fault resolution, self-optimising networks and RAN energy efficiency (Colin Bannon spoke to how BT is building sovereign-by-design network fabrics).
The monetization conversation moved from network optimization to the P&L: in one session, Colt, Google Cloud and GSMA showed agentic AI and Network APIs combining into a new monetization layer — the network as an intelligent, programmable, AI-orchestrated platform for B2B2X services. That is the Alliance’s long-standing point made real — value comes from outcomes and commercial models, not API counts and standards milestones.
Trust, identity and sovereignty became the control layer. What was a back-office, compliance-shaped concern a year ago is now a board-level one — and the framing has widened. Sovereign AI is no longer just about where data or models reside, but about who controls, governs and audits AI-driven decisions. But here the sharpest voice in Copenhagen was a sceptical one. Analyst Dean Bubley flagged a telling blind spot: plenty of talk about sovereignty as an opportunity for telcos — private cloud, in-country AI, datacentres — and almost none about how new sovereignty rules might apply to telcos’ own software, AI and cloud stacks.
No one from the European Commission or BEREC was on stage walking through what proposals like the Digital Networks Act — or the AI and critical-infrastructure obligations telcos increasingly fall under — mean for OSS/BSS and cloudified networks. It’s the mirror image of Brussels and Washington, where almost no one knows what OSS/BSS even is. Opportunity and risk are two sides of the same sovereign coin, and the industry is still mostly looking at one.
The harder questions
Bubley’s wider point deserves repeating, because it’s ours too: there’s a growing disconnect between the internal machinery of telcos and the world outside it. Autonomous networks and agentic AI assume clean, connected systems — but the real world is full of proliferating boundaries and “data borders”: roaming, neutral hosts, IXPs, backbones, satellites, each with its own security and sovereignty constraints. Automation has to cross those silos, not wish them away. More genuine end-to-end thinking is needed.
One highlight deserves its own mention — and a challenge. The Catalyst program put real innovation on display: a wall of genuinely clever proofs-of-concept, many of them startup-led, tackling problems the incumbents haven’t cracked. But a demo is not a deployment. The industry is good at applauding startups once a year and less good at nurturing them the other fifty-one weeks — giving early-stage innovation a durable path from the Catalyst stage to commercial reality.
If real innovation comes from the ecosystem rather than incumbents acting alone — and it does — then working with startups can’t be a once-a-year showcase; it has to be a pipeline, with distribution and commercial pull behind it. That is the layer the industry most needs to nurture, and the one an ecosystem is built to serve.
The room — and the table
It wasn’t all on the main stage. Beyond the keynotes, the week drew a genuinely senior crowd — operator leaders like Telstra’s Kim Krogh Andersen, Telefónica’s Andrea Folgueiras, Vodafone’s Scott Petty and Telenor’s Jørgen Brecke, hyperscaler voices from Google and AWS, and analysts including Dean Bubley and Leonard Lee.
CPaaSAA’s own Head of Research, Andrew Collinson, was on the ground too, and his DTW26 review sharpens the point: telecom’s technology leaders have a much clearer sense of direction than a year ago, even as the business-model picture stays far less formed. The industry is spending its share of a $2.5 trillion AI wave — the open question, as he frames it, is what telecom actually gets back, and what it wants.
The dinner CPaaSAA hosted brought a slice of that room around one table — operators, hyperscalers, Network-API and identity players together — the kind of cross-industry gathering the formal agenda rarely assembles. Leonard Lee of neXt Curve captured the mood, calling it “the nexus of the network-API world.” That is the whole idea. The frontier is too wide, and moving too fast, for any single operator, platform or hyperscaler to see all of it — let alone build it.
The advantage goes to those connecting across the table, not guarding their own corner of it. It’s what CPaaSAA exists to serve, and why the Alliance keeps growing — 100+ member organisations across 25+ countries, convening the whole stack rather than any one slice of it.
The road ahead
Copenhagen closes one chapter; the next few are already scheduled. Next stop is Paris in July for the RAISE Summit, then BATIC in Indonesia in August — and then our own moment: CASA26, in Amsterdam this September, where operators, platforms, hyperscalers and founders come together to turn these signals into the year’s most important conversation.
If DTW confirmed one thing, it’s that the room matters. We’ll see you in Amsterdam.
My lifetime in IT and telecoms has been dedicated to innovation, building bridges and creating change. From the early days of cloud communications to working with operators on innovations and business development, and currently emphasizing APIs, CPaaS/CX and AI, my journey has been one of continuous evolution.
As founding partner at CPaaS Acceleration Alliance and The Next Cloud I'm privileged to help global telcos and techcos thrive in a fast changing world - through events, community building, strategy and global business development. I thrive on challenges and change, strategizing in cloud communications, and bringing people together for mutual success. Travel and continuous learning are my passions.
I believe the global communications industry is pivoting to prioritize customer experience and impactful solutions over mere technology and platforms, and we can tackle societal challenges by merging the strengths of corporates and innovators within new ecosystems.
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