By Faiq Khan, SVP & EMEA Sales Head, Rakuten Symphony

Pre-event commentary | CxO Keynote Panel: Can Telcos Monetize the AI Gold Rush?

Every major industry shift produces two kinds of companies: those that enable the shift, and those that capture disproportionate value from it. The airline industry learned this distinction early. Airplanes stayed capital-intensive and structurally thin on margin. Loyalty programs became something else entirely – often worth more than the airlines themselves.

Telecom is now at the same crossroads.

As AI becomes embedded across enterprise and consumer services, telcos risk occupying a familiar position: essential, regulated, and largely invisible. Once again, they face the prospect of enabling value for others, such as hyperscalers, application platforms, and digital service providers, while capturing only a fraction of the long-term economics.

That does not have to be the outcome, because telcos possess assets that are increasingly rare and difficult to replicate: licensed spectrum, national infrastructure, proximity to the network edge, real-time data flows, and trusted relationships across regulated industries and millions of subscribers.

The question is whether telcos will organize themselves deliberately enough to translate those assets into loyalty and lifetime value in the way airlines ultimately did.

The structural problem: enablers without equity

When enterprises and consumers adopt new digital services, they tend to make platform decisions that are remarkably sticky. The AI wave is no exception. Today, many of those decisions are being made in favor of hyperscalers and large digital platforms. This is not necessarily because they are always best suited to every use case, but because telcos have not consistently shown up with a compelling alternative beyond connectivity.

For more than a decade, the standard telecom narrative around transformation has been: “We are the connective tissue of the digital economy.” While true, this framing is limiting. Being connective tissue does not automatically translate into ownership of the customer relationship or equity.

The problem is not technical; it is structural. Telcos have historically outsourced large parts of system design, service logic, and operational platforms to vendors. In doing so, they have outsourced differentiation. When the platform is controlled by third parties with different commercial incentives, agility slows. Experimentation becomes expensive. What passes for loyalty becomes mostly discounts and churn management.

Closing this gap is not an optimization exercise. Tweaking loyalty programs, running another transformation initiative, or bolting an AI layer onto a vendor-dependent stack – none of it moves the needle. A fundamental reorientation is needed in terms of how telcos design, own, and operate their platforms.

“Operators who treat loyalty monetization as an optimization exercise will find themselves in the same position five years from now – simply running faster networks with the same value leakage.”

What airlines figured out and telcos haven’t yet

Over the past two decades, airlines transformed loyalty programs from basic retention tools into sophisticated, multi-industry platforms. These programs generate margins significantly higher than core flight operations and, in many cases, represent valuations that surpass the airlines themselves.

Airlines achieved this by owning the loyalty stack end-to-end: the customer data, the partnership ecosystem, the rewards economics, and the rules of engagement. Loyalty became a business in its own right.

Telcos have most of the same ingredients. Daily touchpoints, behavioral data at scale, billing relationships, and infrastructure that already touches finance, healthcare, media, and enterprise. The foundation is there.

Hence, the gap between what airlines built and where telcos sit today is a gap of both ambition and execution.

Three monetization plays worth taking seriously

Near-term monetization opportunities exist today and the most credible ones don’t require assets telcos don’t already have.

• Network-as-a-Platform represents the most immediate opportunity. Advanced network capabilities enabled by 5G: dynamic slicing, guaranteed quality of service, real-time location, and network assurance, are valuable in their own right. When exposed through clean, programmable APIs, they allow telcos to participate directly in ecosystem innovation. Note: This is not a new idea, but it has been poorly executed across the industry so far.
• AI-enabled vertical solutions present the strongest medium-term opportunity. Telcos maintain trusted relationships across manufacturing, healthcare, logistics, utilities, and retail. These are domains where compliance, reliability, and outcomes matter. Telcos can position themselves as solution partners here rather than commodity providers by bundling connectivity, edge compute, and domain-specific AI into outcome-based offerings.
• Edge inference-as-a-service deserves particular attention. While AI model training typically resides in centralized data centers, real-time inference must operate close to where data is generated. Telcos are uniquely positioned to host and operate these workloads.

Outcome-driven services

On to outcome-driven enterprise services. Enterprises deploying AI are not buying infrastructure. They want clear answers: how much downtime will be reduced, how quickly anomalies will be detected, and who is accountable when something fails. That is a platform conversation.

Enterprises deploying AI in regulated industries need privacy-by-design, Zero Trust architecture, and sovereign compute options. Telcos with national infrastructure and regulatory relationships are well placed to deliver this. Again, it must be built into the platform from the outset, not offered as an add-on.

Loyalty as a lifetime value engine

When a telco successfully embeds itself as a platform across a subscriber’s digital life, the economics change fundamentally. ARPU increases, churn declines structurally, and lifetime value compounds over time.

Rakuten’s experience illustrates this dynamic. In FY2024, Rakuten Mobile revenue grew 26.2% year-on-year, driven by subscriber growth and rising data ARPU. By the end of FY2025, the subscriber base crossed 10 million and that year marked the first full-year EBITDA profit since entering the mobile market. Ecosystem integration and platform ownership drove that inflection – the same logic that remade airline loyalty economics.

Consider this: subscribers who engage across multiple services within an integrated ecosystem spend materially more, remain customers for longer, and generate higher revenue per account year after year.

The organizational question nobody wants to address

The technology is largely ready. The organization usually isn’t.

Moving from connectivity provider to platform owner means rewiring governance, incentives, and a long-held assumption that manual coordination scales. It does not. It requires treating the operational and digital platform as a core business asset (something to be owned, designed, and continuously evolved) rather than a cost center managed by third parties.

None of this is comfortable. But all of it is necessary.

Operators that are closing this gap exhibit challenger leadership and the willingness to commit to long-term platform thinking. In fact, decisions being made today about platforms, partnerships, and service models will define competitive positioning over the next 18 to 24 months.

Those who move decisively can convert loyalty into a durable profit engine and capture a far greater share of the value they already enable. Those who do not will remain essential – and of course, unrewarded.

This is the conversation I am bringing to the CxO Keynote Panel at FutureNet World. Join me there.

About the Author

Faiq Khan is SVP & EMEA Sales Head at Rakuten Symphony, where he leads the company’s business growth across business units and EMEA markets. Faiq will be speaking on a CxO keynote panel at FutureNet World, alongside senior leaders from Orange Business, BT International, and Telus.