The telecommunications industry is challenged by skyrocketing data demands and complex 5G rollouts, necessitating a transformational shift towards greater operational efficiency. The global AI in telecommunication market size, valued at USD 3.34 billion in 2024, is projected to grow from USD 4.73 billion in 2025 to USD 58.74 billion by 2032, exhibiting a CAGR of 43.3% during the forecast period. This explosive growth is fueled by telecom operators’ needs to streamline operations, reduce costs, and deliver personalized, high-quality experiences at scale.
In the face of these pressures, traditional delivery models are increasingly unsustainable. Legacy systems are impaired by manual processes, vendor lock-in, and slow deployment cycles, hindering their agility, and compromising their ability to compete in today’s market.
As networks become more heterogeneous and multi-vendor, exemplified by the adoption of Open RAN architectures, complexity and interoperability challenges multiply. The solution to that problem is AI-led delivery, which accelerates innovation, transforming it from a competitive advantage into a fundamental necessity across domains like Open RAN, telco data centers, and edge cloud.
In summary, the convergence of AI, Open RAN, and enhanced cloud-native platforms is redefining the telecom delivery paradigm. Telecom operators are embracing AI-led, cloud-native, and open architectures and are poised to achieve unprecedented efficiency, agility, and sustainability. The result enables them to not only reduce costs, but deliver new innovative, services.
Our commitment to quality, rollout, and support positions Rakuten Symphony to pioneer “AI-First Delivery Services.”
Unlike most in the industry, Rakuten Symphony’s delivery organization is structured to provide comprehensive, end-to-end services. We don’t operate in silos. Instead, we unify the entire spectrum of delivery, including:
This integrated ownership means our delivery team possesses not only deep product knowledge but also a strong awareness of quality standards, integration challenges, and the ability to provide advanced support beyond the traditional Network Operations Center (NOC).
Rakuten Symphony's Open RAN software is a leading example of modern, software-defined, disaggregated networks. Our Open RAN solutions, integrated with advanced AI-led automation, demonstrates this ability by reduce deployment cycles from months to days, cutting the total cost of ownership by 30%, while enabling near-instantaneous provisioning and feature rollouts.
Our AI-powered site management platform, trusted by major operators including AT&T, has improved large-scale site deployment and lifecycle management by 60% with a deployment accuracy to 99%.
Additionally, AI has significantly elevated Rakuten Symphony's RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) platform over other systems with traditional algorithms, enabling superior real-time network optimization and automation. This has resulted in up to 25% energy savings in real-world deployments, providing significant reductions in operational costs.
In response to this industry transformation, and to best serve our customers, Rakuten Symphony reinventing solution delivery. We view customer delivery as more than just product deployment. Our holistic approach is to cultivate exceptional experiences and driving sustainable growth. By making delivery AI-led, we ensure our customers receive the innovation they need to thrive. These are the key metrics on which our delivery efficiency in the AI era is going to be measured by:
With these key drivers as the focus, we are prioritizing AI in accomplishing the above customer expectations.
AI-first is a mindset and framework: any task that can be improved—made faster or more effective—through AI will be handled using AI.
Let’s explore some immediate, high-impact opportunities for AI integration across our delivery pillars:
And we are barely scratching the surface.
Implementation of even a fraction of these use cases will put us on a path to accelerating time to value, improved customer experiences and aligning with our culture of disruption through innovation.
Rakuten Symphony’s implementation of these AI-driven use cases across our delivery pillars could fundamentally transform professional services. By embracing an AI-first strategy, we achieve unprecedented efficiency, surpass industry standards, and minimize reliance on third-party integrators, creating a global, AI-led delivery model.
In our subsequent blogs, we will be looking deeper into some of these use cases and how they directly tie into customer outcomes.
