The diagram below was constructed using a spreadsheet of 280 potential opportunities for telcos to provide data and A3 (AI, automation and analytics) products to their enterprise customers.
The feasibility score assesses the likelihood of a telco successfully providing data and A3 products for the particular use cases in a vertical. 0% suggests no opportunity and 100% suggests a very good opportunity.
Real estate has a limited number of customer-motion insight products that a telco can offer with specialist partners. The capabilities needed from telcos are similar to those already offered to other verticals, giving the vertical a high rank on the diagram
Utilities is a market where telcos have been present for many years and areas such as “smart grid” offer opportunities for analytics, AI and digital twin. There was some movement seen around new products for renewables and EV stations which also require A3
Healthcare has seen some telcos build significant businesses, giving an opportunity to add a range of data and A3 products
TMT opportunities are often tied to the provision of private networks for content delivery to sporting/entertainment venues; A3 products include customer motion insight and various sensor-related analytics products
Government offers a wide range of potential use cases for A3, however, progress seems slow compared to other verticals
Advertising offers potential high revenue streams in some countries, but there have been many failed telco projects. Where telcos are active, they can offer anonymised and aggregated data, plus some A3 for data management and personalisation
Financial services have taken a limited number of A3 products from telcos in the last 10 years. The APIs created under the CAMARA project put new focus on this vertical, particularly around fraud and risk management
Manufacturing offers some A3 opportunities which could be added to private network deployments, but 2024-25 has not seen many announcements from telcos outside of a few markets in Asia
Agriculture appears to be getting more interest from telcos as IoT and robotic solutions begin to mature. A3 tends to be very specific to agriculture, requiring considerable focus from the telco
Transportation has a set of more mature A3 activities, such as monitoring and prediction in fleet management. It then has two newer areas requiring a variety of A3 activities: autonomous vehicles and drones. Development of telco A3 in these areas is tied to the ability of telcos to build 5G business in both areas, with most activity in the Asian markets, but most projects still at the pilot phase
Insurance has limited use cases, which are attractive to telcos; however, larger telcos with IT services teams occasionally offer sophisticated product sets. For example, the creation of apps with several different A3 capabilities included
Retail opportunities are split between a few mature opportunities for providing customer-motion insight products for store placement and more specialised IoT and video-related opportunities. There have been multiple pilot projects over the last decade, but fewer have been seen recently
Education remains the vertical with least telco opportunity.
