TM Forum DTW Ignite 2026: key trends impacting the telco industry

With DTW Ignite 2026 in the books, we sat down with Edison Diaz - Canada Branch Lead & Managing Director LATAM at Compax – after the event to discuss the major trends shaping our industry.

Edison, you shared the stage with our partners from Bell Canada. What was that experience like and what was your conclusion?

Edison Diaz: Our presentation was part of a larger panel, "B2B2X and beyond - turning ecosystems into revenue engines," focused on innovative monetization use cases for network operators and connectivity providers. The vision in the market is clear: telcos need to make their network investments count and offer value that extends beyond mere connectivity. Building platforms that let critical business processes be offered as services across domains is a key pillar of any forward-looking strategy. Together with Bell Canada, we're working to do exactly that. It was a great opportunity to share this vision with an audience of 100+ industry experts at DTW Ignite.

Looking back at the event and your conversations there, what key trends do you see telcos embracing as we enter the second half of 2026?

Edison Diaz: Three trends stood out to me: agentic AI, autonomous networks, and composable ecosystems, particularly in the cloud-native BSS domain. Agentic AI was the dominant topic on the show floor. Everyone agrees that agentic use cases will propel AI adoption forward, and there's a lot of creativity around what that could look like. Much of it is still abstract, but concrete use cases are starting to emerge, and there is a clear concern on governance and security around AI. That leads to the second trend: autonomous networks. AI has already made a major impact here. Self-regulation, improved slicing, and traffic prediction have all advanced significantly, making networks more self-sufficient than ever, all in the pursuit of a better customer experience and network cost. Thirdly, composable BSS remains a mainstay topic, though not a new one. What has changed is that recent acquisitions and mergers have reshaped the vendor landscape. These consolidations create additional pressure (and opportunities) to innovate, which plays to the strengths of companies like Compax, whose best-of-suite approach naturally looks at every process end-to-end. That perspective has become especially valuable in 2026.

The BSS/OSS space alone has seen major shifts and consolidation since late 2025. How do you think this will affect the telecommunications industry?

Edison Diaz: As I mentioned, the biggest shift is happening on the process side. Platforms that take a holistic and end-to-end approach show clear benefits: they're easier to operate, scale better, and require far less engineering overhead. This approach also makes it possible to offer isolated processes that still cover an entire journey. For example, if you want to monetize a specific payment interaction as a service that requires connectivity on a dedicated portion of the network, you can do that without invoking an entire chain of integrations. It's easier to design, simpler to implement, and gets to market faster; and we expect that flow focused companies and platforms (like ours) will be leading this transformation. Everyone at the event seemed to agree on one thing: speed kills in this phase of our industry's evolution. Thank you, Edison, for sharing your insights with us!

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You can find out more about the event here: www.tmforum.org/events/dtw
Care to find out how Compax works with leading telcos to navigate the current wave of business transformation? Get in touch!