One of the advantages the telecom industry has is that it is well versed in developing and adopting standards to maximize interoperability between partners and even competitors both at the service provider level and at the technology provider level. Interoperability translates into agile digital supply chains that enable delivery of high value, complex and on-demand digital services to enterprise customers. The widespread availability of first-generation generative AI is already disrupting aspects of many industries and the outcomes of such disruption are far from understood. One thing that is clear for the telecom industry － generative AI will increase demand for the combination of on-demand connectivity, compute and storage supplied by an ever-wider range of downstream suppliers. Business automation between partners both within the telecom industry and across industries will increasingly become essential for the viability of companies in the telecom space.
In 2024, business automation will reach a tipping point, driven by enterprise demand for cloud-like services. In addition, new areas of business automation that will become more widely understood are smart contracts and cyber insurance.
#1: Automation Takes Center Stage: Streamlining Services and Adapting to the Dynamic Landscape
Business automation will continue to surge across industries, driven by efficiency gains, improved customer experiences, and the need for agility in a rapidly evolving digital landscape. Network-as-a-Service (NaaS), which combines connectivity, application assurance, security, and cloud services, is a prime example of how automation facilitates the delivery of dynamic and scalable services, catering to the ever-changing needs of businesses in the hyper-connected era.
Standardized APIs will be key to seamless automation across the supply chain, and operators who proactively adopt standards-based automation will gain a first-mover advantage. By embracing standardized automation operators can deliver services tailored to customer needs faster and improve customer loyalty by making service changes, upgrades, and policy updates on-demand. As customer demands accelerate and evolve, adopting automation will become increasingly crucial for service providers to stay competitive, streamlining service delivery and accelerating time-to-market. Technological advancements like AI and cloud computing will propel automation capabilities forward, enabling increasingly sophisticated orchestration and intelligent service management.
Overall, the future of business automation is bright. NaaS serves as a powerful example of how automation can revolutionize service delivery, and its impact will extend far beyond the telecommunications industry. By embracing automation and prioritizing standardization, businesses can unlock a competitive edge and prepare for success in the digital age.
#2: Smart Contracts for Streamlined Telecom Partnerships
The implications of using automated code running in blockchains (i.e., smart contracts) to do business between partners will become more evident in 2024 within telecoms both large and small. Smart contracts used between business partners (e.g., buyers and sellers) require legal, financial, IT and cybersecurity approvals from departments within all counterparties before they can be used. Compare this with regular text-based master service agreements and terms and conditions which require approval 'only' from the legal and finance departments of the counterparties before they come into force. This high level of coordination of multiple stakeholders from different companies to agree on the use of a smart contract will drive demand for off-the-shelf, open standard smart contracts that can be used as is, or with minimal adjustment. In other words, why reinvent the wheel at great cost with no discernible increase in value?
Standardizing a smart contract means getting industry leaders in the telecom industry to reach consensus on a range of topics: What are the business requirements and use cases for the use of the smart contract? What are the inputs and outputs of the smart contract? What are the interfaces and data models used for the smart contract? Has it been security audited? In what environment will it run? How will blockchain be used to guarantee that the results can be audited, can't be tampered with but don't expose sensitive commercial information? Who will operate the smart contract and how will its operation be paid for? What level of additional capabilities in distributed applications (dApps) will be required?
2024 will see an increased understanding and development of workflows for handling the creation and use of new open standard smart contracts.
#3: Cyber Insurance: Securing the Digital Supply Chain in an Age of Risk
With physical attacks on commercial shipping－especially in the areas of the Black Sea and the Gulf－ being reported in the general media more recently, the public has become more aware of the cost of those attacks especially in terms of increased insurance rates. Without insurance, many ships won't sail on vulnerable maritime routes driving up costs and depriving some countries of easy access to trade and certain goods. The telecom industry is in many ways similar to the shipping industry－rather than loading containers on massive ships that sail across the oceans, the telecom industry is responsible for 'shipping' trillions of packets of mission-critical digital data in fractions of a second across the world for their customers. They and their enterprise customers are collectively storing and processing exabytes of data every day. Many companies in the digital economy would like to be able to pass the risk of damage from cyberattacks on these exabytes of data to a third-party insurer. The challenge is that assessing risk for cyber insurance cannot rely on decades of cyberattack history in the way that maritime insurance uses historical shipping data to calculate its risk premiums.
2024 will see a rising demand for cyber insurance and increased innovation in being able to both mitigate and measure risk from cyberattacks to the global economy's digital supply chains using new zero trust and other emerging technologies.
These are just a few examples of emerging trends that will become more prominent in 2024 in the telecom industry, as well as examples of the huge potential for innovation and new business that can grow to address these challenges over the next few years. Generative AI is grabbing the headlines but many new and important markets for telecoms will emerge as a result and in parallel.
