Telephone companies won’t have a chance with AI unless they deal with legacy infrastructure ASAP

The 1996 presidential campaign for Bill Clinton used the mantra “It’s the economy, stupid” to keep the campaign focused. In the case of telecom, and not to be disrespectful to our readers, you could say "It's the legacy infrastructure, stupid." A big focus for operators right now is to clean up their technical debt so they can pounce on the opportunities in AI. Joe Cumello, SVP and general manager of Ciena’s Blue Planet, stressed the importance for service providers to clean up their inventory systems in preparation for agentic AI. Cumello said, “We have an expression at Blue Planet: You can’t AI what you can’t see. People are realizing when they apply an agent against bad data they get a bad outcome. ”Scott Robohn, co-founder of the Network Automation Forum, said,  “If any telcos want to employ AI and train AI on their data, you need high integrity in the data you feed any model.” One of the highest profile companies that has announced a concerted effort to clean up its technical debt is Lumen Technologies, which announced in January 2025 that it had hired the vendor OneVizion to clean up and organize its internal systems. Cumello said Blue Planet is also working with Lumen on its inventory cleanup effort.