Halfway Through 2026: How Our Five Telecom Retail Predictions Are Holding Up

Back in September, ahead of SummitX, we put five predictions on the table for 2026: AI would move from hype to everyday help, stores would keep evolving instead of disappearing, checkout friction would fade, data would finally drive action, and people would remain the industry’s real differentiator. Now that we’re past the midpoint of the year, it feels like the right time to check those predictions against what has actually happened, including our own work and the conversations we’ve had at MWC, DTW Ignite, and with telcos and retailers throughout the year.

AI moved fast, just not evenly

The prediction was that AI would show up where it matters and quietly take busy work off people’s plates. That part is landing well ahead of schedule. Demand forecasting, restocking, and staff scheduling are already running with a level of confidence that would have sounded optimistic a year ago. What has proven harder is the customer-facing side. Plenty of operators have added AI to individual channels, including chat, point of sale, and support, without making the full experience feel more connected end to end. A joint study from Verizon, Cisco, and Incisiv put a number on that gap this spring: 83% of retailers call AI a competitive necessity, but just 6% call their own AI mature. At MWC in Barcelona, that gap showed up in two ways: voice tools helping reps answer eligibility questions in real time, and frameworks for AI-run sales journeys that are still taking shape.

Stores aren’t dying, they’re just changing shape

This one has held up about as well as any prediction can. At SummitX, we built a full-scale Store of the Future to show the shift, not just describe it. A broken phone became a chance for diagnostics and trade-in. A customer on a different network still got help at a brand-neutral care station. Real-time inventory meant an item not on the shelf could still be picked up or shipped from the store and delivered same day. iQ Storefront and iQ Pay ran underneath all of it, letting an associate check someone in, see live inventory, and check them out from anywhere in the space. The move for the rest of 2026 is not about getting bigger. It is about getting more capable with the footprint retailers already have.

Checkout friction thinned out, but didn’t disappear

Mobile wallets and buy now, pay later kept climbing about as expected, and retailers who invested in embedded payments are generally seeing it pay off in speed and trust. That shows up in payment tools that consolidate processing, hardware, reporting, and support into one system, with broad wallet support, PCI and EMV compliance, and offline reliability. The retailers seeing friction fade treat payment as one embedded step in the sale, not a separate system to reconcile afterward. Financing, trade-in, and activation still tend to lag, though. The definition of checkout kept stretching too, with iQ Pay adding native buy now, pay later support as another option built into the checkout instead of bolted on. For the back half of the year, the opportunity is to close the lag.

Data got less overwhelming, mostly for the retailers who did the work

This prediction was always the hardest to grade cleanly, and the midpoint result feels about right: better tools, uneven adoption. Retailers who centralized their reporting and started treating data as one connected asset are genuinely moving from reactive to predictive. Retailers who skipped that groundwork are, if anything, more overwhelmed than they were in September, since there is more data flowing in now. Data did not stop being a problem. It stopped being a valid excuse for retailers with the right foundation in place. At DTW Ignite in Copenhagen this summer, one of the liveliest conversations was about agentic systems recommending a next best action straight from a retailer’s own data, including an early project we contributed to through the TM Forum Catalyst program.

People are still the advantage nobody’s replaced

Of the five predictions, this needed the least revising. Every operational upgrade this year, including AI, payments, and inventory, has come down to the same question: did it make the person on the floor more effective, or did it just hand them another system to manage? That is the bar operators are increasingly holding their tools to: fewer clicks, fewer screens, less time reconciling systems, and more time with the customer. Training, culture, and frontline empowerment are getting more executive attention this year, not less, which is a sign the industry still believes its own prediction. 

The scorecard at the midpoint

So, four of the five predictions are tracking close to plan, and the fifth, checkout friction, counts as real progress rather than a miss. What is more interesting than the grade is the pattern underneath it: every prediction that is holding up involves connecting something that used to be separate, including channels, payments, data, and teams, into one operation instead of a stack of point solutions. Our own work this year has been one piece of that pattern, built on a simple idea: a rep, a customer, and a transaction should not need three different systems to agree with each other. The second half of 2026 probably is not about writing five new predictions. It is about whether the industry finishes what it started.