This is The Road to Autonomous Networks. Every month, the signals that show where the network is actually heading.
Highlights from this month:
- Verizon made more than 70 million autonomous network changes last year.
- T-Mobile's network reorganized itself through a winter storm while a million people lost power.
- And the reason operators invest in autonomy is shifting, from trimming cost to defending revenue.
All of it rests on one thing: whether the data underneath can be trusted. For most operators, that is still the missing piece.
— Vicent R. Soler Ruiz, CEO @ Kenmei
NVIDIA: network automation is now the #1 use case for AI ROI, ahead of customer experience
For the first time in four years of NVIDIA's telecom survey, customer experience is no longer the top use case for AI ROI.
- Network automation is, at 50%, ahead of customer service at 41%.
- 89% of operators plan to raise their AI budget in the next twelve months, up from 65% a year ago.
- Yet 88% still sit between Level 1 and Level 3 on the TM Forum autonomy scale.
The intent has moved to the network. The maturity has not caught up.
Source: NVIDIA, State of AI in Telecommunications 2026 (4th annual edition, 1,038 telecom professionals surveyed) — https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/lp/industries/telecommunications/state-of-ai-in-telecom-survey-report/
Verizon: more than 70 million autonomous network changes in a single year
Verizon's AI agents now work the network around the clock.
They catch an anomaly, spin up sub-agents to trace the source, and close the issue in under two minutes.
The agents are not the hard part. Underneath sits a common data layer with near-real-time telemetry, granular enough to read performance floor by floor inside a building. The agents work because that layer came first.
Data foundation, then agents, then autonomy.
Source: Verizon SVP & CTO Yago Tenorio , speaking to Light Reading — https://www.lightreading.com/network-automation/verizon-unleashes-ai-agents-in-the-network-but-keeps-humans-in-the-loop
T-Mobile through Winter Storm Fern: 68% of affected customers reconnected within the hour, 98% within eight
Winter Storm Fern hit more than 30 states in January. Over a million people lost power.
T-Mobile's self-organizing network made tens of thousands of automated adjustments on its own, rerouting traffic and stretching battery life.
- 68% of customers in the storm's path reconnected within the first hour, 98% within eight.
- Sites stayed alive for more than 250,000 extra minutes.
Autonomy usually gets sold as an OPEX story. Fern tells a different one: who stays connected when no human can react in time.
Source: T-Mobile Newsroom, "Every Second Counts: T-Mobile Advances a Stronger, Smarter, More Resilient Network for Americans" — https://www.t-mobile.com/news/network/t-mobile-advances-stronger-smarter-network-for-americans
TM Forum: 81% of operators target Level 4 by 2030. Around 4% are there today.
For years, autonomous networks were pitched as a way to cut cost. TM Forum reframes them as a revenue lever: operators monetizing network quality and customer experience, not only trimming OPEX.
If autonomy becomes a way to grow revenue, the question changes to how much experience you can guarantee, measurably and repeatably. You can only promise that if the data underneath holds. 81% of operators aim for Level 4 by 2030. Around 4% are there today.
The gap there is a data-foundation gap, not a shortfall in technology.
This is the gap we built for.
In an exclusive interview by Mitch Wagner at Fierce Network this month, our VP of Sales Ali Wansa what it takes: turning multi-vendor network data (counters, traces, topology, configuration) into one governed foundation agents can trust.
You can read the whole interview is here:
→ Kenmei builds a data foundation for autonomous networks
Sources: TM Forum, "Scaling to AN Level 4 to unlock network value" (June 2026) — https://inform.tmforum.org/research-and-analysis/reports/scaling-to-an-level-4-to-unlock-network-value ; Fierce Network, "Kenmei builds data foundation for autonomous networks" — https://www.fierce-network.com/cloud/kenmei-builds-data-foundation-autonomous-networks
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The Road to Autonomous Networks is a monthly read for the people building them: CTOs, heads of network, RAN and operations leaders. Each edition collects the market signals that show where the autonomous network is actually heading, and what still has to be true underneath.
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