Breaking The Telco Legacy Paradox In The GenAI Era
Yogesh Malik, Global CTIO / CTO of the Year 2017 / Embracing New Tech Trends for Customer Experience / Telco Digitalization.
The telecom industry has long been at the heart of digital transformation—from the first dial tones to the immersive, low-latency promise of 5G. We've helped usher in a fully digital lifestyle, enabling faster speeds, better experiences and seamless connectivity.
But telecommunications companies now face a profound internal contradiction: the Telco Legacy Paradox—the tension between the need to transform and the convenience of remaining a commodity.
As a chief technology innovation officer (CTIO), I've encountered this paradox continuously over the past 30 years, transforming telcos across continents. While consumers and enterprises thrive in a fast-paced, digital-first ecosystem, telcos still manage deeply entangled legacy environments. Think radio stacks spanning from 2G to 5G, over-customized IT systems, undocumented business logic and aging domain expertise. Every generation of technology layered on complexity without fully retiring the past. The result: decades-old systems weighing down innovation and stretching already tight budgets.
This isn't just a technical challenge—it's structural, economic and deeply human. Change requires a steep learning curve, and shutting down legacy systems carries real risk. Even 2G and 3G networks still power critical services, from utility IoT devices to rural voice access. Regulatory requirements, multi-generational customer bases and long-standing operational dependencies all make transformation harder than simply rolling out the next "G."
With CAPEX and OPEX consumed by keeping the past alive, investments in next-gen architecture, platforms and experiences often struggle for support. Optimizing seems safer than transforming. But this safety is an illusion—it only delays the inevitable.
GenAI: A New Path Through Legacy
Until recently, eliminating legacy environments seemed prohibitively complex. Today, GenAI presents a compelling inflection point—an opportunity to overcome barriers with greater intelligence and automation.
With the right mindset, bold leadership and smart application of GenAI, telcos can finally address legacy challenges in cost-effective and scalable ways.
Unlike transformation tools of the past, GenAI can reason across the messiness of legacy systems. It can map undocumented data flows, automate IT operations, translate legacy codebases into modern languages and simulate the impact of sunsetting old technologies. GenAI is not just another tool—it's a catalyst for rearchitecting complexity at its core.
By understanding data flows more deeply and using GenAI's capabilities, telcos can tackle legacy in these key ways:
• Building A Knowledge Fabric: Leverage data flows to build a metadata-driven knowledge layer that reduces reliance on undocumented institutional knowledge.
• Modeling Sunset Impact: Predict the cost, revenue and user experience implications of phasing out legacy technologies.
• Automating IT Operations: Automate repetitive tasks and enhance support through AI-powered operations and intelligent assistance.
• Refactoring Legacy Code: Analyze and modernize outdated codebases by translating millions of lines—such as COBOL—into more modern programming languages like Java.
• Modernizing Infrastructure In Real Time: Deploy specialized AI agents to dynamically assess, update and rebuild complex infrastructure with minimal downtime.
Mindset Over Mechanics
But cutting-edge tools alone aren't enough. To fully leverage GenAI, CTIOs must lead a mindset shift—from reactive maintenance to proactive transformation.
That means investing in data observability across the telco and IT stack, treating metadata as a strategic asset and creating a "living knowledge fabric' that outlasts individual tenures. It also means rethinking organizational structures, governance and KPIs to prioritize long-term simplification over short-term patchwork fixes.
We must also acknowledge what we can't do alone. Legacy isn't just an internal challenge—it's a symptom of industry-wide fragmentation. Despite global standards like 3GPP, implementations remain highly customized. Interoperability is poor, vendor lock-in is high and talent pools are shrinking.
Collaboration is essential. CTIOs should drive partnerships across GSMA, regulators and industry alliances. Initiatives like Open Gateway and standardized APIs are steps in the right direction. But we must push further—toward modular, federated architectures that de-risk future evolution.
Reclaiming Telco's Place In The Digital Economy
Digital connectivity is no longer a luxury—it's foundational to daily life. Yet 57% of the world remains offline. Telcos have a responsibility to close this gap and support broader digital infrastructure equity.
The future CTIOs must go beyond technology orchestration. We must become data stewards, ecosystem builders and business model innovators. Only then can we turn telcos into 'data super factories,' unlocking the value of rich network telemetry and customer behavior datasets to power smart cities, public planning and ethical AI governance.
Done right, this shift will improve economics, reinforce national digital strategies and reestablish telcos at the center of the digital economy.
This is the moment to break the paradox. Yes, the challenge is real. But GenAI gives us the chance to eliminate legacy intelligently—if we're bold enough to act. The cost of inaction is no longer just technical debt. It's strategic irrelevance.
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