The Mobile Economy 2025 report from GSMA provides critical insights into the telecommunications industry’s trajectory through 2030. These findings, as well as those of Telecoms operators share their visions for Operations of the Future, a Mobile World Live (MWL) report on a telecoms.com survey developed in partnership with BMC and Amazon Web Services (AWS), highlight key opportunities and challenges for telecom providers seeking a competitive advantage in today’s market.
The mobile economy and revenue pressure
According to the GSMA report, mobile technologies and services generate 5.8 percent of the global gross domestic product (GDP), contributing $6.5 trillion in economic value. By 2030, this contribution will reach nearly $11 trillion (8.4 percent of the global GDP). However, mobile operators face significant revenue pressure, with average revenue per user (ARPU) projected to grow at just one percent in high-income countries and three percent in low- and middle-income countries through 2030.
This limited revenue growth is driving operators to diversify services and develop new revenue streams, particularly in the enterprise segment. The GSMA Open Gateway initiative, which aims to leverage network capabilities through common APIs, represents one such effort, with 72 operator groups (that comprise 78.5 percent of global mobile connections) signed up as of February 2025.
Three critical areas for operational transformation
AIOps and automation
The telecommunications industry is increasingly applying artificial intelligence (AI) across all operations, including network, energy optimization, customer service, and retail. While early AI deployments have focused on internal solutions to improve performance, the GSMA report identifies a growing shift toward developing AI solutions for external customers, particularly enterprises. Examples include China Mobile’s AI integration with financial industry processes, Singtel’s AI cloud service partnership with Scale AI, and Telefónica Tech’s generative AI (GenAI) platform for business process optimization.
The Mobile World Live report found that AIOps was either the first or second priority for approximately half of respondents for their future operations, sharing, “The possibility to harness automation to reduce workloads, eliminate repetitive tasks, and ensure error-free network operation is a compelling driver, opening up the possibility to both reduce cost and improve customer experience.”
Implementation challenges
Despite clear strategic imperatives, operational transformation remains challenging. Respondents to the telecoms.com survey identified skills development as the greatest barrier to successful delivery of improved operational performance (43 percent of respondents), followed by cost pressure (32 percent) and time pressure (25 percent).
Two-thirds of respondents reported having a strategic corporate plan for enhancing operations, suggesting growing leadership buy-in for transformation initiatives. However, approximately 60 percent indicated they would use partners for both strategic operational direction and implementation, highlighting the need for external expertise to fully leverage technologies like AI and autonomous networks.
With expertise in the telco industry, and experience with major communication service providers (CSPs) as part of its service assurance stack for four decades, BMC Helix is well-positioned to support CSPs in their transformational journey—especially with many telcos migrating workloads and network functions to the cloud.
Operational convergence of IT and network operations
As migration to cloud continues, and both operations and service management shift from being technology-centric to customer-service-centric, the conventional boundaries between IT and network are blurring. Consequently, we see major CSPs driving towards IT and network convergence as a strategic imperative rather than an efficiency measure.
BMC Helix Service Management for Telco is based on the principle of service centricity. As the Mobile World Live report highlights, service management is a critical telecom operator function within service assurance that needs extensive modernization so operators can be in a position to increase their operational excellence and improve the customer experience.
GenAI at the center of CSPs’ future ambitions
In the MWL report, GenAI was a top three technology priority for about half of its respondents, making it a prioritized technology across the widest selection of respondents, where it will automate processes and free up thousands of human hours. That’s just one of the ways it will be a foundational enabler of the “Operations of the Future.”
Strategic imperatives for telecom operators
The Mobile Economy 2025 report makes clear that telecom operators must transform their operations to remain competitive. With limited revenue growth projections and increasing customer expectations, maintaining the status quo is not sustainable. Successful “Operations of the Future” will be defined by AI-powered service assurance, autonomous operations, and operational convergence. Telecom providers that embrace these changes will be better positioned to operate and manage the services that enterprises and consumers demand—while operating more efficiently and sustainably.
To learn more, download Telecoms operators share their visions for Operations of the Future.
