Artificial intelligence drives autonomous networks, customer service gains

Research from Nvidia has concluded that artificial intelligence (AI) is accelerating the industry’s transformation, unlocking new business and revenue opportunities as operators accelerate the technology’s adoption.

The fourth annual State of AI in telecommunications survey was carried out from September to November 2025, gathering responses from 1,038 respondents. It included a 60/40 split between management (including executives) and AI practitioners, including engineers, network operators, architects, cloud operators and IT.

Respondents encompassed a range of industry segments, including internet service providers, independent software suppliers, network equipment providers, consulting services, operators and system integrators.

The study showed AI was having a tangible revenue impact and return on investment (ROI). Overall, about nine out of 10 respondents said AI was helping to increase revenue and reduce costs.

Operators, representing about a quarter of the 1,000 responses in the survey, were also seeing the benefit, with 90% saying AI has had a positive impact on revenue and costs. Some 60% said their organisation was using or assessing generative AI, up from 49% in 2024, while 89% said open source models and software are important to their AI strategy.

The impact on revenue and ROI was found to be leading telecommunications companies to increase their AI budgets in 2026. Overall, 89% of respondents said their AI budget would increase in the next 12 months, up from 65% in last year’s survey, with 35% saying their budgets would increase more than 10% from this year.

The top AI use cases cited for ROI were AI for autonomous networks (50%), followed by improved customer service (41%) and internal process optimisation (33%).

Nvidia said these findings signalled a bold step towards autonomous networks – AI-driven, self-managing systems that can self-configure, self-heal and self-optimise with minimal human intervention. In addition, 88% of organisations report being between levels 1-3 of autonomy, as defined by the TM Forum, and the use of generative AI and agentic AI is expected to accelerate the shift to level 5 autonomous networks.

“There is a seismic shift underway in the telecom industry driven by AI,” said Sebastian Barros, managing director of Singapore-based comms provider Circles. “Comms service providers are converging on a new realisation. Their role in society extends beyond moving bits across networks toward moving intelligence across local and regulated infrastructure. Autonomous networks deliver immediate ROI by eliminating human effort from repetitive, reactive workflows. The fastest impact areas are energy management, fault prediction, configuration drift correction and capacity planning.”

Chetan Sharma, CEO of Chetan Sharma Consulting, added: “Autonomous networks are delivering return on investment faster than any other AI use case because they directly reduce outages, energy consumption and manual intervention. Agentic AI accelerates this by coordinating decisions across domains in real time. Generative AI delivered fast productivity gains, but agentic AI is where telecoms begin to see structural ROI. Autonomous agents can act across networks, IT and customer journeys, turning insights into decisions without human delay.”

A surge in edge computing investment was also found to be reshaping telecom network architectures, bringing AI inferencing closer to users through a distributed computing infrastructure. Telcos were also stepping up investments in AI-native RAN and 6G.

This latter trend was regarded as a major industry intercept ahead of the traditional 6G deployment cycle, with 77% of respondents anticipating a much faster time to deployment of this new AI-native wireless network architecture.

The top drivers of investment were found to be using AI to enhance spectral efficiency, improving the performance of the radio access network supporting edge AI applications and accelerating the research and development of 6G. Just over three-quarters of respondents said they expect to see AI-native networks launch before the deployment of 6G.

AI was also seen as a driver of almost universal boosts in productivity, advancing autonomous networks and business opportunities as well as improving internal operations. Nearly every respondent in the survey said AI is boosting employee productivity, with 26% citing major to significant improvements to their ability to complete more tasks with higher quality in less time. The productivity gains were coming from generative and agentic AI services deployed across operations, from the back office to networks.