The paradox of today’s market is that telcos build the highways that power the digital economy, yet the most profitable traffic - AI, security, and cloud services - often bypasses them.
To recapture this lost value, for years the industry mantra has been to "move up the stack," but simply selling more services has proven insufficient. In a market where enterprises are aggressively digitizing, offering "good enough" connectivity is no longer a differentiator. Independent industry research shows traditional connectivity growing at under 1% annually, while digital and IT services for businesses are growing in the high single to low double digits, underscoring that basic connectivity alone no longer differentiates a CSP.
The real opportunity lies in shifting from a utility provider to a solution orchestrator. And this shift in how value is delivered is powered by consulting-led, AI-driven managed services, transformation and strategic ecosystem partnerships.
The Strategic Imperative: Own the Outcome
Enterprise leaders are drowning in complexity. Their environments now span private networks, sovereign clouds, sovereign AI, industry solutions and edge computing, and the market is rewarding partners who can manage this fragmentation seamlessly.
Telcos are uniquely positioned to step into this gap, leveraging their existing trust and infrastructure footprint. By wrapping connectivity with managed security and AI operations, operators can pivot from selling commodity bandwidth to delivering business continuity. Gartner projects that by 2027, 65% of new SD‑WAN purchases will be part of a single‑vendor SASE offering, up from 20% in 2024. This transition captures the high-value enterprise budgets that currently flow to systems integrators.
However, moving from connectivity to solutions requires overcoming significant hurdles: lack of productized solutions, gaps in sales capability for complex offers, and the difficulty of retaining niche technical skills in-house.
Two operational shifts make this viable:
- Scale without sprawl: Trying to build every B2B solution in-house - from SDWAN/SASE to Sovereign AI - creates slow launches and high overhead. Leveraging established platforms enables the deployment of complex services immediately, without the heavy lift of internal R&D.
- Commercial agility: The right ecosystem partners protect margins rather than diluting them. They enable the delivery of high-value services (like GPU-as-a-Service and Industrial IoT) without requiring massive capital risk to build the infrastructure alone.
The Growth Engine: AI-Driven Managed Services
AI changes the math of managed services, moving the operational focus from ‘time to fix’ to ‘prevention’.
When embedded deeply into network operations, AI turns a cost center into a retention engine. The impact is measurable:
- 80% improvement in first-contact resolution when agents are armed with AI diagnostics.
- 40–50% faster time-to-market for new enterprise services via automated provisioning.
- 30–40% cost efficiency driven by zero-touch operations.
This shift turns reliability into a sticky product feature. When AI self-heals a fault before a client’s trading floor even notices, the service becomes integral to their operations and far harder to churn.
The Force Multiplier: Ecosystems & Partnerships
No single player can dominate IoT, Cloud, Security, and Sovereign AI simultaneously. Attempting to do so creates silos, not solutions.
The ecosystem model offers a faster route to market, addressing the critical need for data security and sovereignty in AI adoption. By integrating with hyperscalers, OEMs, and specialized integrators, Telcos can:
- Gain instant competency: Immediately offer validated, high-demand solutions like Sovereign AI and AI-DC services, mitigating enterprise risks around public cloud data privacy.
- Accelerate credibility: Enterprise buyers might hesitate to buy cloud security from a Telco, but they will trust a solution validated by a global tech leader and managed by their connectivity partner.
- Simplify the chaos: The telco becomes the single point of accountability, orchestrating disparate technologies into one SLA-backed service.
A Consulting-Led, AI-Powered Platform Approach
This is where Wipro steps in, not just to support the network but to accelerate the business on top of it.
Wipro TelcoAI360 helps Telcos unlock their B2B potential through its platform built specifically for the complexity of the Telco environment. Unlike generic IT tools, it integrates the value chain from the customer portal down to the network assurance layer.
Under the Wipro IntelligenceTM framework, technology is mapped to commercial reality:
- Outcome-based models: Engagements are structured to share risk and reward, meaning Telcos aren't just buying capacity; they are buying growth.
- Full lifecycle support: The journey is managed from the initial consulting and design phase right through to AI-operated managed services.
- Pre-integrated ecosystem: The platform arrives with deep integrations for major OEMs and hyperscalers, significantly cutting the time it takes to get new offers into the hands of the sales team.
Making the Shift to Orchestration
The era of the Solution Orchestrator is here. By using AI to manage operational complexity and partnerships to scale capability, Telcos can finally capture the value they create.
The transition starts with a decision: to stop building everything from scratch and start leveraging platforms that are ready to scale B2B ambition. This is how Telcos stop competing on price and start winning on value.
Discover how Wipro TelcoAI360 can accelerate your enterprise growth strategy.
