DTW Ignite 2026: The industry is moving past AI hype. Now we’re figuring out how it all works together.
Every year, DTW Ignite brings together the telecom industry’s sharpest minds to try to wrestle how we build a more connected, composable, and innovative future. This year in Copenhagen, the theme was “The Future, Faster” and I was fortunate enough to attend in person. In speaking with folks throughout the three-day event, I felt a few significant shifts.
The TM Forum ODA Changes the Room
One of the most underrated shifts I noticed this year wasn’t on a mainstage slide, it was in the hallways and booth conversations. TM Forum Open Digital Architecture (ODA) is changing the conversations between CSPs and vendors.
Rather than spending meetings explaining products or trying to uncover basic challenges, everyone is arriving to the conversation with a shared language. They are openly discussing business problems, architectural gaps, and the outcomes they’re trying to achieve.
Instead of talking about tactical features, we were talking about how to solve real business problems together.
AI Is Finally Getting Specific
At lunch one day, a stranger sitting next to me declared to his colleagues “The presenter has said ‘AI’ more than 20 times in the past two minutes.” I accidentally laughed, because I understood exactly where he was coming from. For three years running, AI has dominated every event, every keynote, and every hallway conversation in this industry. The word has become a reflex.
But for three years running, much of that conversation has lived in the abstract. This year felt different. The use cases coming forward are now tangible. We’re now seeing genuine examples of AI meeting customers where they are — across acquisition, onboarding, troubleshooting, and retention — and adapting to context in ways that feel less like automation and more like genuine responsiveness. The shift from “AI can do this” to “here’s how a customer actually experiences this” is a meaningful maturation of the conversation.
But there’s an important nuance worth naming: Not all AI innovation moves at the same speed. Embedding AI into network infrastructure will remain genuinely hard. Legacy systems, regulatory complexity, and the sheer scale of telecom networks means that transformation there will be measured in years, not quarters.
Where CSPs can move much faster is on the commerce side of their business. The physical and digital sales experience and how their customers discover, evaluate, purchase, and upgrade is far more agile terrain. AI applications in commerce don’t require rearchitecting a network; they require connecting the right data to the right touchpoint at the right moment. That’s a solvable problem today. CSPs that recognize this distinction and invest accordingly will find themselves with a real competitive advantage while the longer network transformation plays out.
ODA’s Blind Spot: The Customer
There was a phrase I kept hearing in different forms across sessions and conversations this year: providing top-tier service is now table stakes. The brands that will win long-term are the ones building a deeper, more durable relationship with the consumer. They are earning mindshare, not just market share. Telecom has historically struggled here, and the industry knows it. The encouraging news is that it’s moving from awareness of the problem to active investment in solving it.
But the vision and the implementation are still far apart. Everyone at DTW is talking about composable architecture and seamless consumer journeys. The reality is messier. Because there’s no established ODA framework governing the consumer journey layer, every operator is inventing their own approach, resulting in bespoke integrations that quietly create the vendor lock-in the composable model was supposed to prevent.
And that points to a fundamental gap: TM Forum’s ODA framework doesn’t address the actual interaction with the customer. The moments of truth that define how a consumer perceives and relates to a brand sit largely outside its scope and yet, those moments are precisely where CSPs make their money. Acquisition, upgrades, renewals, add-ons: the commercial engine runs through the customer experience layer. It’s a significant omission worth naming so we can begin to address it together.
Agent-to-Agent Commerce: The Next Frontier
The conversation I keep turning over in my mind is the one around agent-to-agent communication and what it means specifically for commerce. As AI agents become more capable and more embedded in both enterprise workflows and consumer-facing experiences, the question of how those agents interact with each other is becoming urgent.
The opportunity is enormous. The risks around data governance, accountability, unintended decision chains, and customer trust are equally significant. Right now, the industry is at the “lots of questions, few answers” stage, which is exactly where it should be. But the companies and frameworks that get ahead of the governance and interoperability challenges in agent-to-agent commerce will be better positioned for what comes next.
DTW Ignite 2026 was, for me, a conference that delivered more signal than noise. The ODA is making the ecosystem more collaborative. AI is becoming relevant in ways it hasn’t been before. And the industry is starting to take seriously what it means to build a lasting relationship with the consumer.
The gaps are real, but they’re defined enough now that solving them feels tractable. That’s progress worth celebrating. That’s “The Future, Faster.”
