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In this week’s Zero-Touch newsletter, Rakuten Symphony CMO Geoff Hollingworth shares his observations on telecom’s persistent “sexiness” challenge and why his experience at the recent AWS Breaking Barriers Hackathon, held at FYUZ 2025, has him thinking telcos may finally be getting their innovation groove back. Then AWS 6G and AIML Technologist Ejaz Sial and AWS Industries Director Technology Kaniz Mahdi share a readout from the hackathon, which brought together 377 participants from 68 projects and crowned a winner that showcased impressive, AI-driven RAN learning and optimization. First up, Geoff Hollingworth.
Who said telecom was dead!?
AWS leaders Ejaz Sial and Kaniz Mahdi kindly invited me to be one of many esteemed judges for the Breaking Barriers Hackathon the company held in partnership with Telecom Infra Project and its FYUZ 2025 event in Dublin.
I have helped run telecom hackathons since the 2000s. Easily the biggest challenge has been getting people excited about the innovation possibilities within telecom. In those early days, the connectivity freedom and consumer handset excitement that defined the 90s had faded away. Internet startups and home bandwidth grabbed the headlines and attention, and telecom network innovation was simply not as sexy as photos of food or your favorite cat.
Now feels different, though. I’m starting to wonder if telecom is becoming 90s sexy again and why that might be the case.
The answer was on full display at the AWS hackathon, where there was no shortage of participation across age, disciplines and gender. These groups spanned the young, never been involved in telecom, to industry veterans who were now able to do what they always wanted but were never enabled before.
Telecom’s tent is growing again and with a front row seat to the thinking and creativity of over 60 teams that successfully produced solutions in the two-day event, I am incredibly encouraged by what I saw and heard. We’ve got to find a way to harness the energy and diversity in that room and spread it to every corner of telecom. Not doing this is the biggest threat to our industry thriving again as an innovation center. Now is the right time.
Coding is just so much more assisted these days and AI has placed that on steroids. From frontend interfaces to backend services that scale, it has never been easier to create solutions.
Are these solutions fully industrialized at the end of 48 hours? Absolutely not. But they are the best product requirements display I have ever seen. I think the biggest immediate future of AI coding assistance may be in product management, replacing large text requirement documents with living prototypes that capture the full interaction, experience and prototype. This is now possible at scale. And by using commercially hyperscale functions in support, the journey from prototype to full production might not be as big as we think.
It is day one of software 2.0 rewiring the planet. Software 1.0 was procedural and imperative with outcomes based on conditions and rules. Software 2.0 (AI) is data driven with outcomes based on data, not code. AI is as exciting as the data somebody has access to, defining what is possible. Telecom has the potential to be sexy again because it has planet-sized situational data that is waiting for its full value to be unleashed. Our industry knows where six billion people are every second of every day, and that is just one data point. If somebody is excited about playing in data science and AI, then doing so in telecom is like being a pig in mud.
We need to get out of our own way. We need to put responsible guardrails in place. We need to let loose of the art of possible. We are not as far away from these hackathon outcomes being new product velocity as we think.
Congratulations to the prize winners and all participants–you were all winners!
Thanks again to AWS and the whole Breaking Barriers team for hosting a brilliant event. And a big thank you to Kristian Toivo and the Telecom Infra Project for hosting the FYUZ conference, which surfaced similar glimpses of optimism, possibilities and excitement.
AWS 6G and AIML Technologist Ejaz Sial and AWS Industries Director Technology Kaniz Mahdi share top takeaways from the Breaking Barriers Hackathon at FYUZ 2025.
Last year, AWS announced Breaking Barriers, a worldwide program designed to accelerate the development and deployment of generative AI solutions at scale for our telecom customers and partners. Since our inaugural hackathon, we have engaged over 3,000 developers in over 100 countries, developing cross-industry solutions for healthcare, education, agriculture and beyond.
AWS has teamed up with industry leaders, startups, technology partners and academia to break down barriers to AI adoption and pave a path to an AI-native future. By developing frameworks for seamless access to accelerated AI infrastructure, machine learning environments, and industry leading models and abstracting domain specific complexities, we’re enabling AI solutions that drive digital inclusion and transform everyday experiences.
Most recently, AWS Breaking Barriers was strategically planned in partnership with the Telecom Infra Project ahead of the annual FYUZ conference. The objective was simple: utilize the power of Agentic AI using Amazon Bedrock AgentCore and Strands Agents to build the substrate for the Data and AI Foundations initiative being launched with TIP members, and to showcase crowd-sourced innovation enabled by these foundations.
The results were nothing short of incredible, as we brought together 377 participants from 68 projects. 43 in-person teams joined Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Telecom Infra Project (TIP) at Dublin-based Dogpatch Labs, with an additional 25 teams from around the world competing in a separate virtual stream.
Our grand-prize winner was LaunchLoop / echofold.ai, which developed Arano, a vendor-agnostic, AI-driven platform that continuously learns and optimizes the RAN using autonomous agents on a digital twin of your network.
To provide developers with a sandbox for agentic networks development, we developed the AI Native Networks Immersion Day: a four-hour workshop demonstrating how to transform traditional telecommunications network operations into autonomic, agent-driven systems through hands-on implementation of AI-native network architectures. The core concept revolves around creating AI agents using Amazon Bedrock AgentCore that can manage network elements as agents invoking bespoke MCP servers.
As an example, we used a typical O-RAN deployment and selected two specific interfaces – the R1 interface for rApp lifecycle management and the O2 interface for O-Cloud infrastructure management to become exposed via MCP to an agent running in AgentCore Runtime. By layering in AgentCore Memory, allowing agents to maintain context across network operations and learn from previous interactions, we show an illustrative example of what agentic network functions might entail.
However, to model the complexity of a more robust O-RAN implementation, we show how the myriads of interfaces and network functions could be abstracted as a much broader series of tools all exposed via AgentCore Gateway. With each interface defined as an illustrative AWS Lambda function, we demonstrate how existing network functions can be abstracted into agent-controllable interfaces.
The Breaking Barriers for Agentic Networks Hackathon represents just the beginning of our journey towards an AI-native future. As we continue to evolve agentic AI systems and expand our developer community, we invite builders, engineers, architects, and innovators to join us in shaping the future together. The tools and frameworks demonstrated during the hackathon from Amazon Bedrock AgentCore to Strands SDK are now available for you to start building your own agentic network solutions.
The registration for our 2026 AWS Breaking Barriers challenge is open with more to follow soon after.
Have questions for Geoff Hollingworth, Ejaz Sial or Kaniz Mahdi? Mention them in the comments to start a conversation!
