Speakers

Harel Givon, general manager – Amdocs (chairperson)

Pragash Pillai, CTO – Hotwire Communications

Craig Cowden, EVP, chief technology and product officer – Metronet

The telecoms industry is consolidating fast, and for the operators caught in the middle, too large to be nimble, too small to be immune, the pressure to modernise is existential. At Metro Connect 2026, a fireside chat brought together two of the sector’s most forward-thinking technology leaders to discuss how transformation, AI investment and strategic partnership are separating the winners from those being acquired.

The session, chaired by Harel Givon of Amdocs, featured Pragash Pillai, CTO at Hotwire Communications, and Craig Cowden, executive vice president and chief technology and product Officer at Metronet. What emerged was a candid account of two companies that have made significant bets on technology and are already seeing the returns.

Scaling for growth, not just survival

Pillai opened by drawing a clear distinction between two types of operators he sees in the market today. “Those companies eventually have to sell the business because they don’t have the infrastructure to grow,” he said of operators who have focused solely on building private networks without investing in the wider business. “We fall into the latter category — building private network but also scaling the business for growth.”

Hotwire’s model is deliberately narrow. The company focuses exclusively on HOA and community-type infrastructure, deliberately avoiding the retail mass market. That focus, Pillai argued, is a competitive strength – allowing Hotwire to build deep relationships with homebuilders and communities rather than competing head-on with the major carriers. “A lot of the businesses that we win are based on relationships,” he said. “They built one building and then the next one and we get the same opportunity.”

For Metronet, the transformation story pivoted around a landmark commercial deal. Cowden described how closing a wholesale-retail partnership with T-Mobile, backed by KKR, fundamentally changed the company’s operating model.

“It’s a wholesale-retail relationship where essentially T-Mobile does the sales and marketing,” he explained, adding that the deal required significant technology integration work to enable real-time interaction between T-Mobile’s sales and tier-one care functions and Metronet’s technical support capability.

Crucially, Cowden argued that Metronet’s attractiveness as a partner was no accident. “We had done a technology transformation even prior to that relationship, and I think that’s actually one of the reasons why we had done so well and became an attractive candidate for T-Mobile.”

AI as a competitive weapon

Both speakers were unambiguous about the role of artificial intelligence – not as a future consideration, but as an operational reality being deployed now. Pillai described a three-bucket framework for thinking about AI investment: AI ops for day-to-day operational optimisation, cybersecurity, and product innovation.

His most striking example was Hotwire’s use of AI to develop its entire mobile app and website. “I can’t imagine getting everything done in six months and launching it in the Apple Store,” he said, noting the app was due to go live the following week. “If you look at the traditional way of doing things, you have a bunch of software developers writing code, someone debugging it, someone launching it – and then you find errors. We cut those cycles. When you find errors, you can fix them in days or hours versus weeks.”

Rather than replacing staff, Pillai described a shift in how developers are deployed. “We transformed our software developers into more of a validation role, because you can’t just take what AI gave you and launch it,” he said. “We use them on a different scale versus what they used to do previously.”

Cowden echoed this operational focus, describing a series of knowledge base use cases being rolled out across Metronet’s residential and technical support teams in the next three to six months. “Now anybody, including a brand new employee, can access it – and it’s really impressive and very easy,” he said. He was candid about the sequencing of more complex AI deployment, noting that automated root cause analysis and truly agentic capabilities require more sophisticated approaches – “that’s where the LLM and RAG come into play.”

Both speakers pushed back on the idea that AI investment is primarily about cost reduction. Pillai was emphatic that the opportunity is as much about product innovation and customer experience as it is about operational efficiency. He pointed to developments in home automation and computer vision – cameras capable of identifying individuals, their employer and the purpose of their visit – as indicative of where telecoms AI could go. “Those are things I think we need to continue to push the boundary on,” he said.

Partnership as a strategy, not a concession

A recurring theme throughout the session was the role of ecosystem partnerships in enabling smaller operators to punch above their weight. Cowden described workflow automation built around platforms including Pega, integrated with mapping, design and ERP systems to manage construction projects across more than 100 concurrent sites. The ability to coordinate that complexity without a proportionally large headcount, he suggested, is itself a form of competitive differentiation.

For Givon, representing Amdocs, the message to technology partners was equally direct – operators need partners willing to work in genuine collaboration, not simply sell products. He described Amdocs’ approach as one of opening up its own development work, sharing progress across its customer base and co-developing solutions to challenges expected to emerge two to three years from now, in partnership with Nvidia, AWS, Google Cloud and others.

“What we are doing is working in full partnership,” Givon said. “Allowing operators to focus on the things that are the differentiator they have with their customers – and we are coming open.”

The broader picture that emerged from the session is one of an industry at a genuine inflection point.

The operators investing heavily in technology transformation now – in AI, automation, strategic partnerships and operational infrastructure – are building the foundation not just to survive consolidation, but to drive it. As Pillai put it: “Either small or big, you’ve got to take advantage of AI regardless. There’s tremendous opportunity – not just for cost, but for innovation.”