This past week at DTW Ignite in Copenhagen, one thing became crystal clear: telcos are going all-in on AI. Everywhere you turned—demos, keynotes, strategy decks—you saw AI fueling bold new ambitions. Agentic AI, AI Kitchens, AI-ready networks. Telcos are building data lakes, spinning up Centers of Excellence, pushing AI into operations and customer experience. Everyone’s chasing the treasure.
And side-by-side with that? Network APIs.
Also everywhere. Also ambitious. Also filled with potential. But different. Slower. More fragmented. And still searching for its North Star.
From APIs to Impact
Make no mistake: there’s been incredible work done. GSMA’s Open Gateway Initiative now boasts 49 standardized APIs, 47 live operator implementations, and a growing base of certified use cases. Aduna, the new joint venture backed by 14 telcos, is bringing commercial consistency to northbound APIs. TM Forum, Project CAMARA, CPaaSAA—we’re seeing alliances, interoperability, certification, and global rollout pipelines finally starting to align.
But for all this effort, there’s a problem: most conversations still focus on supply.
Which APIs have launched? Which MNOs are on board? Which GSI has signed with Aduna this week? How many API categories are live?
And we’ve missed the turn.
No one buys into AI because of the number of GPUs or LLM tokens processed. We get excited because we see results: AI agents that sell and serve customers, generate video content, and create operational lift. The AI movement is storytelling, demos, and rapid iteration. It’s messy, but it has traction.
Meanwhile, Network APIs—despite their massive potential—still feel like a systems roadmap, not a business revolution.
Fragmented Ecosystem, Forgotten Developer
Look no further than the developer panel hosted by Peter Arbitter at DTW. Four impressive voices—Laude, IndyKite, Perfect-ID, and TikTok—each doing real work. But the conversation? Again, it focused on which APIs were used, not business models, use cases, value created or scaling lessons.
STL Partners just published research revealing that 90% of surveyed developers had never heard of Network APIs or misunderstood what they were. That’s staggering. Even with telcos partnering with hyperscalers like Google and Microsoft to expose APIs via developer platforms, awareness and understanding remain almost nonexistent. Just being listed in a portal is not enough.
We urgently need to flip the script.
What Network APIs Could Enable
This isn’t just telco transformation.
Network APIs, done right, unlock the architecture of the AI era:
- Trust & Identity: SMS OTP is being outlawed in many countries. Silent authentication and programmable trust layers are needed. Network APIs can deliver that.
- AI Vision & Quality: As AI tools generate real-time audio/video at the edge, we’ll need APIs that guarantee latency, prioritize packets, and dynamically adjust QoS. Network APIs again.
- AI Edge Cloud: With 60–70% more network security threats YoY, AI will need sovereign, programmable infrastructure—something telcos are uniquely positioned to provide.
In this context, Network APIs aren’t just an interconnect layer. They’re the enablers of an AI-native communications ecosystem. But no one is telling that story clearly enough. No one is showing how we get from today’s commodity pricing debates to tomorrow’s intelligent engagement economy.
The $100B Opportunity—and Why It’s Dismissed
McKinsey once projected a $100–300B opportunity tied to Network APIs—not just from API call fees, but from the full stack of services they enable: identity, orchestration, experience, edge, enterprise enablement.
That number often gets dismissed as too big, too vague, or “not just APIs.” But that’s precisely the point.
Just like AWS didn’t monetize by selling API endpoints but by building services on top of them, telcos shouldn’t be obsessed with call volume. They should focus on the stack: APIs as a Service, business models, enablement.
Yet we keep hearing the same metrics: number of APIs published or certified, number of telcos signed up, number of GSIs bought in.
Even the current “success” stories are thin. One live demo at the show—NTT Data + Matrixx + nabstract.ai, who won the Catalyst Moonshot Award—showed the kind of impact we need to replicate. We need 100s of those, not whitepapers.
What Needs to Change
Here’s what’s missing—and how we fix it:
- Set Big, Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAGs) Forget 1,000 developers and $100M revenue targets. We need to think 100,000+ developers and $1B by 2027, on a path to $100B by 2030. Let’s align behind outcomes that match the promise.
- Tell the Right Story Stop talking about the number of APIs. Show the revenue models. Tell the success stories. Make the rest of the industry jealous. Create FOMO.
- Unite the Ecosystem We have Aduna, GSMA, CPaaSAA, TMF, CAMARA—all doing amazing things. But it’s a patchwork. We need one movement, one shared platform, one rallying cry. Not a calendar full of separate events inviting each other to speak.
- Invest in Developer Awareness Don’t just integrate with developer platforms—market to developers. Support them. Build ecosystems around their success. Look to the CPaaS playbook.
- Create a Venture Builder Track If the business models aren’t clear, let’s co-create them. Telco-backed venture builders can accelerate early-stage startups using Network APIs to solve real problems.
Time for a North Star
Sebastián Barros summed it up best in a LinkedIn post this week:
“Network APIs look underwhelming and the activity level won’t unlock value. GSMA, CAMARA and other initiatives are doing great work… but we are missing the North Star and a strategy to achieve it.”
He’s right.
We’re doing the hard work. But we need the why, the when, and the who—not just the how.
The AI movement has that. The Network API movement can too—if we align, aim high, and build together.
Let’s make Network APIs something telcos want to do, not something they feel obligated to do. Let’s build the trust layer of the AI age. Let’s tell the story—not of interfaces, but of impact.
The work so far? Impressive.
Now let’s make it inevitable. Join CPaaSAA, GSMA, CAMARA, McKinsey and others in Amsterdam in September for CASA25, where we deep dive for 3 days into IMPACT.