Telco has a context problem: why AI needs an ontology (John Abraham)

Appledore Research analyst John Abraham joins Telco in 20 to argue that telco's AI problem is a context problem, not a data problem, and that an ontology is what gives AI the business context to act reliably.

Every telco exec is talking about AI agents. Almost nobody is talking about what those agents actually need to work: context.

Not just data — the logic, rules, and decision-making processes that define how your business actually operates. That knowledge currently lives in two places: buried in vendor code nobody fully understands, and inside people’s heads. No agentic system, no matter how shiny, can make decisions without it.

In this episode, I sit down with John Abraham, Partner and Principal Analyst at Appledore Research, to dig into why a lack of context is the real blocker for AI at scale, why most approaches only solve half the problem, and how an ontology gives AI the business logic it needs to not just analyze, but decide and act.

Listen now to hear:

• The three Cs holding telcos back from using AI at scale [04:42];
• Why AI agents risk creating a new generation of silos [08:59];
• How a small use case can unlock compounding AI value [14:13]; and
• Why a data lake is a costly side quest [15:09].