Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:05):
So we're in Copenhagen for DTW Ignite 2026. I'm here with Priyanka Ravichander, who's the Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Commercial Officer at Tecnotree. Prianca, great to see you. Thanks very much for joining us. Now this show is kind of nearly all about AI, but what kind of impact is AI having on the telco sector? What are the implications of the AI era?

Prianca Ravichander, Tecnotree (00:31):
I think that's a fair question because there is a lot of hype and buzz around it, especially this event, previous events as well. I think the central theme around the AI impact within the telecom industry has centred primarily around hyperscalers because they bring the infrastructure, they bring a lot of data themselves, they bring the data orchestration capabilities and services along with it. But I think the conversation needs to mature fairly quickly into what is the operator's role within the AI value chain. I think operators today have a couple of key assets which are yet to be exposed for full scale monetization. They have the customer relationships. They have real time event driven data that's available ripe to be monetized. They've got the distributed networks and then they've got the billing and compute capacity to charge in real time. So the question is not whether or not the CSPs are going to play a role.

(01:34):
The question is, are they going to be service providers to the AI economy or are they going to define the AI economy themselves? And I think that's why we're here today talking about AI platforms and what are those enablers for enterprises?

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (01:49):
Well, at last, it seems to me, and maybe I'm wrong, but there also seems to be an increasing focus on business as well as technology strategies. What does this mean for telcos? What do they need to be thinking about?

Prianca Ravichander, Tecnotree (02:04):
So I would even go a step further to say that this new wave of transformation has to be BSS led. The reason is because we're moving away from the plan-bill-launch offering model to the sense-predict-act model. And when you do that, the platform of BSS actually transforms into a revenue generation engine for the operators. It's no longer the build cycles that are legacy every month and you add cost of sales to it. The definition of some of these KPIs is becoming much, much richer. They want to understand what is the AI that's being bundled and enabled into the service? How is that orchestrated across your platform, across your services, across your cost of sales? So the definition is moving from a purely ARPU led model to a customer lifetime value model. And I think that's where BSS really plays a revenue generation engine capabilities within the operator ecosystem.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (03:04):
Well, these kind of things have been talked about for a while. So why aren't they already happening right now in 2026? Yeah,

Prianca Ravichander, Tecnotree (03:10):
That's a good question because you're as intelligent as your legacy systems are. So the biggest blockers today for telco could be a legacy catalogue, a legacy charging system, systems that are not able to scale into the new real-time event-driven economies of the future. And what we're trying to see here is that intent has become the interface. A partner might come to a CSP and say, "I want to launch a Travel SIM service with AI embedded capabilities, payment orchestration. I want to launch this in three countries." That's just a prompt. So intent is becoming the interface. It's not click to configure. It is intent to revenue because now with the simple prompt, what they're looking for is the catalogue configurations to be auto generated, the revenue share models to be immediately provided. Provisioning should happen and the partner should launch. Now anybody, any platform today, any operator today can onboard a partner.

(04:04):
The trick is that it takes six months, 17 integration meetings, 15 approvals, and by that time the market has already moved. So you need a platform that is going to ensure your time to value and ensure that your current revenue systems are actually going to be monetization engines of the future.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (04:23):
Now does this mean that service providers should be thinking differently about their KPIs and the way that they measure success?

Prianca Ravichander, Tecnotree (04:32):
Absolutely. So you hear these KPIs in the marketplace. You see customer lifetime value, GMV, GTV, CTR, eCPM. These are marketplace models. They're not talking about subscriber, number of subscribers, ARPU revenue. These are very legacy KPIs. And what a revenue engine can provide, a BSS led AI native revenue generation engine can provide is a transformation from these legacy KPIs into the new age of the marketplace KPIs, really making and solidifying the telecom space in the value chain as an enabler for enterprises as well as consumers. And I think that's where you're going to see the shift.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (05:17):
So what does that mean for service provider portfolios, what they might offer to their customers? Because we're kind of stuck in the connectivity tier.

Prianca Ravichander, Tecnotree (05:28):
I'll tell you one thing. If you ask any operator here, if they're in the connectivity business and they say yes, they've lost 50% of their total addressable market already. They're not in the connectivity business. They are in the intelligence monetization business. So connectivity to intelligence, intelligence to ecosystem monetization. And we are right now in that inflection point where operators are able to transform their businesses into true technology enablers as opposed to just selling connectivity.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (06:00):
But they have to want to do that, right?

Prianca Ravichander, Tecnotree (06:04):
I think the will is there. It was just like the vendor lock-ins. TM Forum is definitely helping in this space to ensure that legacy platforms are not locking in providers into certain types of architectures that limit their ability to influence the AI market. And now I think you have the foundation project, which is called Model as a Service Initiative by the TM Forum. We are a founding partner. We're one of the first vendors that are the founding partner of that initiative. We are no longer looking at operators as a gate. In fact, we're looking at operators as a gateway into the AI economy. Some operators have already invested in their infrastructure. They have the real-time events. Now they have a model gateway that enables different types of models in the model zoo that could come from anywhere that creates a telco grade monetization framework for AI embedded into their customer journeys.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (07:00):
So that's one way that Tecnotree is helping to move the industry on. How else are you helping the transformations that we're seeing in the telco sector?

Prianca Ravichander, Tecnotree (07:10):
To me personally, I believe that the next billion dollars for any telecom operator is already in the network and you don't have to increase your coverage, increase your infrastructure. It's already there. It's with you. It's going to come probably from the right partner, from the right use case to enable customer lifetime value on your existing customer base. Of course, it's more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to retain existing customers. So you need to just find the right technology partner, the right platform partners that are interested in finding that next billion dollar value proposition that's already sitting inside your network. You don't have to go anywhere. And I think that's where Tecnotree comes in and can be a great technology partner for operators that are looking to go beyond connectivity.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (07:55):
Okay. So unlocking the value that's already there in the industry. Prianca, great to talk to you today. Have a good DTW Ignite 2026 and hope to talk to you again in the future.

Prianca Ravichander, Tecnotree (08:08):
Pleasure. Pleasure's mine. Thank you so much.