How do operators embrace new service-led business models to set themselves up for future success? That's one of the key questions Ahmed Bilal from Tech Mahindra addresses in his recent conversation with Rakuten Symphony.
In this video from MWC Barcelona 2026, Sheheryar Khakwani (SK), SVP, Partner and Portfolio Management at Rakuten Symphony, speaks with Ahmed Bilal, SVP, Business Head, Network Services (Americas) of Tech Mahindra, about how the two companies are addressing key customer issues.
They discuss the telco industry’s biggest challenge, how Rakuten Symphony enables agentic AI in telco networks, and the companies’ partnership that is driving Tech Mahindra’s new service-led business model.
Ahmed: “The single biggest challenge we see is the 5G ROI dilemma. Operators have poured billions into 5G infrastructure, but the monetization hasn’t followed. Like 4G before it, 5G has built incredible digital highways, and the connectivity is there. What’s missing is the business model that turns that connectivity into returns. Closing that gap is the problem everything else has to serve.”
Ahmed: “What Rakuten did with Open RAN, disaggregating the network and running it on flexible, cloud-based infrastructure, was the telco industry dream. These open networks scale at a far better cost and they are more TCO-friendly because operations are autonomous. But the bigger prize is the architecture that makes it possible. An open, cloud-native, autonomous network exposes the data and the programmable control that AI needs to act. That’s what lets you introduce agentic AI. Not just automatic tasks, but giving operators a foundation to run, optimize and eventually monetize the network in ways a closed, manual stack never could.”
Ahmed: “Tech Mahindra wants to be a service orchestrator, not a traditional IT service provider. The difference is where the value sits. We don’t just want to deliver services and bill for efforts. We want to help our customers, whether telcos or enterprises, monetize their assets and share in that outcome. That’s why the model we have with Rakuten Symphony matters. It’s an open ecosystem, which gives us room to build partnerships from every angle, rather than locking the customer into a single stack.”
