Four predictions on the future of off-net wholesale order management
Wholesale (or off-net) telecom orders arise when communications service providers (CSPs) are forced to rely on external carrier networks to fulfill customer demand beyond the limits of their own “on-network” infrastructure. Rather than building new facilities, CSPs purchase last-mile or access services from other providers. This model allows carriers to serve more locations, respond to enterprise customer requests and remain competitive.
However, it introduces additional complexity. Off-net services require a chain of order entry, provisioning, inventory tracking and monthly billing. Each of these stages generates data that must align across multiple systems and partners. In addition, carriers bill each other in inconsistent formats, with vastly different line-item structures. This lack of standardization makes it nearly impossible for traditional tools, such as spreadsheets or basic CRM systems, to reliably ingest and validate wholesale orders at scale.
Today, the communications industry is at an inflection point where there will be winners and losers based on those who adopt new ways of thinking — and those who don’t. Fortunately, solutions already exist that help streamline order management — an area poised to greatly benefit artificial intelligence (AI). While the majority of telcos are using AI for numerous functions, many have yet to apply it to order management. Still, the integration of artificial intelligence is expected to transform operational efficiencies in the telecom order management market.
Following are four predictions for the future of off-net order management
1. Telco hyper-automation will serve as a foundation for AI-powered iPaaS
Today, telecom carriers automate and successfully utilize AI in some internal systems like billing and contact centers. The trend will continue in the years ahead as CSPs build agentic AI into their BSS/OSS stacks. Over time, telcos will hyper-automate their BSS stacks and begin injecting AI into most business workflows. However, these AI-powered, autonomously functioning systems can’t exist in isolated silos and must talk to each other in order to maximize effectiveness.
“TransUnion is closely working with our customers, and the industry, to facilitate BSS/OSS stack modernization through our Universal Order Connect (UOC) platform, helping eliminate the frustration, chaos and delays typical of wholesale ordering. While AI is being rapidly adopted by carriers in other areas of operation, wholesale order management lags for now due to process complexity and data quality. Promising areas for AI in wholesale ordering today focus on the enhancement of quoting/pricing and order error standardization.”
- John Denemark, Sr. Vice President, Carrier Provisioning at TransUnion
2. Agentic AI will enable dynamic, market-driven pricing and automated ordering
Modernizing BSS/OSS stacks while using AI to power workflows and data management will create the conditions for business-level changes, should carriers so desire. The increased intelligence and automation of BSS/OSS stacks will create the opportunity to simplify and further automate intercarrier interactions, leading to near real-time relationships.
For example, instead of simply listing available capacity, AI-powered marketplaces could analyze user locations and time-based demand patterns to predict where off-net connectivity is needed and create market-driven pricing to match. This would allow sellers to proactively offer capacity to potential buyers, creating a more efficient match between supply and demand.
Agentic AI acts as an autonomous market participant, continuously adjusting prices based on both real-time and anticipated conditions. Rather than waiting for an RFP or quote request, a seller’s AI agent will proactively publish context-aware offers. Meanwhile, the buyer’s AI agent continuously scans the marketplace for optimal matches. It then evaluates price, SLAs, delivery time and historical performance. If everything looks good in terms of meeting the defined thresholds, the ‘agent’ accepts and places the order automatically.
According to AI In Telecommunication Market Size & Trends Research by Market Growth Reports, by 2024, 90% of telecom companies had adopted AI in some form, with 48% running pilots and 41% actively deploying AI solutions.
3. Order errors will become a thing of the past
Modernizing carriers’ BSS/OSS stacks with AI will have other benefits. It will de-couple ordering from the legacy ASOG standard that complicates inter-carrier ordering today and leads to errors. The other huge benefit will be in internal address data, network data and inventory management. Allowing AI-based solutions to manage these functions will lead to increased accuracy and completeness. AI will identify and resolve data mistakes and other issues before they impact customers, with humans setting the objectives (e.g., reduced downtime), and AI agents devising and executing the best strategies to achieve them.
One of AI's core strengths is its ability to recognize patterns in large datasets. By noting systemic patterns in ordering and provisioning errors, AI can detect issues humans might miss. Unlike humans who may focus on a single order at a time, AI can assess months or even years of orders, providing a holistic view of the entire process.
4. Neo clouds will allow carriers to become ‘AI factories’
Telecom operators and neo clouds are converging, with carriers seeing opportunities to leverage their existing infrastructures for AI services. As defined by STL Partners, neo clouds are a new generation of cloud providers that specialize in delivering high-performance computing infrastructure for demanding AI and machine learning workloads.
While not specific to off-net order management, we predict neo clouds will have a positive impact on the wholesale space, allowing carriers to play a larger role in the AI race. Neo clouds can host shared platforms for things like order orchestration, partner settlement and SLA tracking — and will likely become the infrastructure supporting smart contracts and shared ledgers.
But of course, neo clouds offer the potential to go well beyond off-net order management. Telecom providers can leverage neo clouds as a strategic extension of their networks — not simply as another IT platform but as a new service, control and monetization layer. In effect, carriers will have the opportunity to become “AI factories,” offering enterprise services like vision analytics, robotics inference and AI solutions specialized for different verticals. According to NVIDIA, at least 18 telcos are already building these AI factories across various parts of the world.
Finally, building and expanding neo clouds and AI factories will greatly amplify demand for better, faster, more reliable connectivity — further boosting inter-carrier buying and selling. UOC will be there every step of the way to facilitate wholesale connectivity commerce.
Wholesale connectivity has long been managed by spreadsheets, emails and manual workarounds that no longer scale. As enterprise demands accelerate and networks become more software-driven, this approach is increasingly unsustainable. The next era of wholesale access order management will be defined by AI-powered platforms, autonomous agents and neo cloud infrastructure that bring speed, intelligence and trust to a historically fragmented process.
TransUnion Universal Order Connect (UOC) is a cloud-based platform that helps CSPs automate and streamline the entire process of buying wholesale network services while helping deliver new connections faster.
Learn more about Universal Order Connect (UOC).
