Telecoms survey reveals AI as top investment priority for 2025

The survey report, with data collected from a host of participants including Communication Service Providers (CSPs), vendors, and system integrators, investigates the telecom business performance in 2024 and the outlook of 2025 to uncover what's hot and what's not in the industry.

Survey respondents identified AI, automation, and machine learning as their top priority investment area in 2025. Drilling down into the data and disaggregating it by company type, the report also shows that more than one in three CSPs are already implementing and using AI solutions in some areas, while about three in ten of all respondents report implementing and using AI solutions.

While there is still more integration to be done before the industry can claim it has fully embraced AI, this finding indicates the beginning of a shift away from curiosity (e.g. proof of concepts and pilot projects) and towards AI integration, particularly by CSPs. This shift is likely to intensify over the next five years and with the introduction of 6G which some argue will be an AI-native network.

Further, the report shows a dichotomy of views around AI’s perceived effect on the industry, with nearly half the respondents believing AI will have an incremental impact on telecoms and over two in five respondents suggesting it will be transformative for the industry.

Investigating the greatest potential threat to telecom organisations’ profits and long-term business success, the research highlights increasing pressures to lower profit margins and prices alongside ongoing wars and geopolitical tensions as the top two most frequently selected concerns.

The study also emphasises that deploying edge computing is perceived as ‘very important’ to existing telecom networks but that nonetheless, most respondents are not yet ready to fully embrace the technology in their existing networks. This may be due to cost concerns which the report identifies as a key barrier especially for CSPs.

Another area the survey report investigated is the next generation of Wi-Fi technology, which of course includes Wi-Fi 7. The results identify introducing new tech use cases and enhancing multi-user experiences as top drivers for Wi-Fi 7 but there remains a lack of certainty over the timeline for deployment.

Overall, the results and analysis of this research piece point to a positive and hopeful year ahead as organisations report they are due to wrap up a ‘good’ year in 2024.

To read the full analysis and get access to the data sitting behind these and other findings, you can download the report here.