1、Technology,Media&Telecommunications Practice Telcos AI inflection point:What leaders do to capture valueAgentic AI offers telcos a potential opportunity to reorient their recent trajectory.The question is whether they can redesign their organizations enough to make the most of it.March 2026This arti

2、cle is a collaborative effort by Benjamim Vieira,Guilherme Cruz,Ignacio Ferrero,and Toms Lajous,with Borja Belda,Daniela Mendoza,and Manuel Palacios,representing views from McKinseys Technology,Media&Telecommunications Practice and QuantumBlack,AI by McKinsey.For more than a decade,telecom operators

3、(telcos)have pursued successive waves of digital transformation to offset slowing growth,rising capital intensity,and limited product differentiation.Most delivered incremental gains,but not the type of overarching structural change that the industry requires at a time when the pace of innovation,co

4、mpetition,and challenging secular issues show no signs of slowing down.Agentic AI may be the first technology capable of altering that trajectory.Unlike earlier automation tools that improved individual tasks,AI agents have the potential to reshape entire workflows,even helping make operational deci

5、sions and coordinate work across functions.This shifts AI from being a powerful productivity tool to a full-scale execution layer that can fundamentally change how telcos design operations,deploy capital,and create value.The question for telco leaders is no longer so much about where exactly to appl

6、y AI,but how to redesign the enterprise to operate with and optimize it.Over the past few years,much of the sector has learned the hard way that there is no quick way to make that happen.But even as most telcos have failed to gain real value from their growing AI investments,rolling out too many fra