North American Telecom, Media Firms Modernize with Cloud, AI

Telecom operators and media and entertainment companies in North America are rapidly adopting cloud-native architectures and AI-enabled workflows to meet evolving operational requirements and business challenges, according to a new research report published today by Information Services Group (ISG) (Nasdaq: III), a global AI-centered technology research and advisory firm.

The 2025 ISG Provider Lens Telecom — Managed and Next-Gen IT Services report for North America finds that U.S. and Canadian telecom operators are prioritizing large-scale transformation of operational support system (OSS) and business support system (BSS) platforms as they confront decades of technical debt, fragmented architectures and the growing complexity of hybrid cloud and edge environments. Similarly, the 2025 ISG Provider Lens Media and Entertainment — Managed and Next-Gen IT Services report for North America finds that studios, broadcasters and over-the-top (OTT) platform operators are accelerating digital transformation as streaming consumption grows, margins tighten and content volumes expand.

“North American telecom and media companies are moving from fragmented, legacy environments to unified, cloud-based operating models,” said Rajib Datta, partner at ISG. “Modernization is no longer incremental and is now foundational to competitiveness and monetization.”

Cloud-native operations have become the largest area of telecom investment as carriers replace monolithic OSS and BSS stacks with modular, container-based platforms, the telecom report says. Nearly every major North American operator now runs a hybrid estate that combines on-premises infrastructure for network workloads with public cloud platforms for IT and digital services. This approach allows them to increase flexibility, reduce failure risks and better align infrastructure costs with demand while maintaining control over network functions.

AI-enabled operations are reshaping how telecom enterprises manage networks and IT environments at scale, ISG says. Operators are embedding AIOps and GenAI into network and service operations to enable predictive fault detection, faster root-cause analysis and closed-loop remediation. AI-enabled customer care platforms have also emerged as important tools as competition intensifies in mobile, broadband and cable markets. They are reducing the cost of serving customers while improving satisfaction and retention while customer churn remains a persistent challenge.