{"id":54426,"date":"2026-09-28T12:17:35","date_gmt":"2026-09-28T11:17:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/north-america\/?p=54426"},"modified":"2026-09-28T12:17:36","modified_gmt":"2026-09-28T11:17:36","slug":"legacy-it-blocks-americas-telcos-from-turning-ai-into-growth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/north-america\/2026\/09\/28\/legacy-it-blocks-americas-telcos-from-turning-ai-into-growth\/","title":{"rendered":"Legacy IT blocks Americas telcos from turning AI into growth"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

TM Forum research finds 88% of CIOs across the Americas say legacy IT lock-in is holding back new customer value, commercial impact and the race to autonomous enterprise.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

TM Forum research, released ahead of Innovate Americas 2026 in Dallas (October 6-7), shows legacy IT lock-in and complexity are now major barriers to AI-powered growth for US carrier organisations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For telcos, AI can open up new revenue opportunities, speed innovation and enhance agility, but legacy IT must be simplified before carriers can turn ambition into commercial impact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Reinventing IT in the AI era<\/em> report on telco CIO priorities reveals the Americas as a region where AI is strategically urgent, but still constrained by legacy IT, fragmented systems and governance challenges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Among the region\u2019s telco CIOs, 81% acknowledge dependence on legacy vendors and systems integrators, while 88% say migrating from closed legacy systems is difficult – well above global averages of 66% and 73%.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The findings highlight legacy IT lock-in as the region\u2019s sharpest modernisation challenge, slowing how quickly carriers can scale AI, launch new services and monetise network capabilities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The region\u2019s CIOs are prioritising the work needed to move AI from experimentation to commercial impact, with investment focused on customer experience (58%), IT modernisation and technical debt reduction (54%) and faster time to market (50%).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe race to the Autonomous Enterprise will be won by operators that can translate AI ambition into operational reality. That requires a deliberate Re-Invent IT strategy: modernizing the IT estate, reducing fragmentation, establishing trusted governance, and creating the foundations for AI to scale safely, autonomously, and commercially across the business,\u201d says Willie Stegmann, EVP, Composable IT and Ecosystems, TM Forum.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the Americas, governance is the top barrier to AI adoption, cited by 47% of operators, while skills lead globally at the same level. The finding points to a sharper regional challenge of governing AI safely and consistently enough to scale it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The research also points to where Americas operators see growth. Network API monetisation leads the region\u2019s new revenue agenda, followed by B2B2X and network slicing – a signal that carriers are betting on the network itself as the platform for AI-era growth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

TM Forum research finds 88% of CIOs across the Americas say legacy IT lock-in is holding back new customer value, commercial impact and the race to autonomous enterprise. TM Forum research, released ahead of Innovate Americas 2026 in Dallas (October 6-7), shows legacy IT lock-in and complexity are now major barriers to AI-powered growth for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":58,"featured_media":54427,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,43],"tags":[226,2255,153,12992,464,5901,4898,10926,9363,1115,4588,12698],"class_list":["post-54426","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-telecom","category-top-stories","tag-ai","tag-americas","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-autonomous-enterprise","tag-cios","tag-it-modernisation","tag-legacy-it","tag-network-apis","tag-network-slicing","tag-telcos","tag-telecoms","tag-tm-forum"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/north-america\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54426","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/north-america\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/north-america\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/north-america\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/58"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/north-america\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54426"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/north-america\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54426\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54428,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/north-america\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54426\/revisions\/54428"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/north-america\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/54427"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/north-america\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/north-america\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54426"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/north-america\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}