By Ricardo Velhuco, Field CTO at Ocient
DTW Ignite 2026 brought together communications service providers, technology leaders, and innovators from around the world to explore one of the industry’s defining challenges: how to build networks that are not only AI-powered, but intelligent enough to make better business decisions.
For Ocient, the week was filled with conversations about the future of telecom—and ended with an exciting industry recognition.
Ocient, alongside E-lighthouse Network Solutions, Iquall Networks, Locatium.AI, Minsait, and Microsoft, received the TM Forum Outstanding Catalyst Award for Asset Excellence, recognizing a Catalyst project supported by champion operators MTN, Mauritius Telecom, and Telefónica.
The award celebrates solutions that demonstrate measurable industry impact through collaboration, innovation, and real-world implementation. For our team, it was also validation that one of telecom’s biggest challenges is finally becoming solvable.
Rethinking How Networks Get Built
Telecom operators invest hundreds of billions of dollars every year, expanding and modernizing their networks. Yet many of those investment decisions are still made the same way they were a decade ago.
The problem isn’t a lack of data. It’s that the data lives everywhere.
Engineering teams optimize for network performance. Finance teams focus on return on investment. Commercial organizations track subscriber growth, churn, and competitive pressures. Each group relies on different systems, different metrics, and different planning cycles. Bringing those perspectives together is often slow, manual, and expensive.
The result is that investment decisions are frequently driven by technical priorities alone instead of a complete picture of business value.
As networks become larger and more complex, and AI places even greater demands on infrastructure, that approach is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain.
A Different Approach
Our Catalyst project explored a different way forward.
Rather than looking at network planning one domain at a time, the project brought together planning across RAN, fixed broadband, transport, core, and data centers into a unified investment view.
Using specialized AI agents, the platform can evaluate demand forecasts, identify coverage gaps, model capacity constraints, assess churn risk, and estimate financial return—all while producing transparent, explainable recommendations that planners can review and act on.
Just as importantly, the solution was built on TM Forum Open APIs and the Open Digital Architecture (ODA), allowing it to integrate with existing OSS/BSS environments rather than requiring operators to replace the systems they already rely on.
The goal isn’t to replace human decision-makers. It’s to give engineering, finance, and commercial teams a common understanding of where investment will have the greatest impact.
Trust Starts with Data
Communications service providers are eager to adopt AI, but meaningful outcomes require more than powerful models. They require trusted, complete, and accessible operational data that can be analyzed in real time.
That’s where OcientAIQ™ plays a foundational role.
Built for enterprise-scale data, OcientAIQ enables organizations to ingest, manage, and analyze massive, high-velocity data streams without unnecessary data movement, providing the trusted foundation AI applications need to deliver reliable recommendations at scale.
Collaboration Drives Progress
Catalyst projects have always been about more than technology—they’re about bringing operators and ecosystem partners together to solve shared industry problems.
We’re grateful to our teammates at E-lighthouse Network Solutions, Iquall Networks, Locatium.AI, Minsait, and Microsoft, along with our champion operators MTN, Mauritius Telecom, and Telefónica, for helping turn this vision into reality.
Winning the Outstanding Catalyst Award is an honor, but the bigger takeaway from DTW Ignite was the momentum across the industry. Operators are moving beyond experimenting with AI and focusing on how to apply it to real business decisions.
We’re excited to be part of that journey and we’re already looking forward to what’s next.
Interested in learning more about how Ocient powers AI-driven network analytics for telecom operators? Explore our CSP solutions or get in touch.