How telcos can help enterprises scale emerging technologies

Digital investments are on the rise – but to realize their full value, enterprises need to advance faster from trials to deployments.

In brief

• Enterprises are spending more on emerging technologies year-on-year – but are struggling to expand pilot use cases into live production.
• When assessing potential providers, businesses are clear on the vendor capabilities they’re seeking, yet are still finding it hard to make choices.
• Information and communication technology vendors must stress their ecosystem relationships and ability to generate business value by combining technologies.  

The digitization of industries is well underway, with enterprises embracing a range of technologies — from 5G to artificial intelligence (AI) and edge computing — to power their transformation. But progress remains uneven, for three main reasons.

First, businesses are struggling to move from pilot to production, with their ability to embed new technologies in their organization uncertain. Second, customers lack awareness of the latest business model and technology variants to invest with certainty. And third, enterprises have limited confidence when engaging with a complex vendor ecosystem, making it hard to make effective supplier choices.

Businesses in every industry are looking to engage suppliers who can deliver positive business outcomes in conjunction – and collaboration — with a range of ecosystem partners. Information and communication technology (ICT) providers must act now to meet these demands, especially given the growing interest among enterprises in consolidating the number of suppliers they use.

Download the EY Reimagining Industry Futures study 2025 (pdf).

As investment continues to rise, the digital infrastructure agenda is extending across the C-suite

The latest EY Reimagining Industry Futures study confirms that the momentum behind enterprise investment in emerging technologies remains robust. Nearly half (47%) of businesses are investing in generative AI (GenAI), up from 43% the previous year; 43% are investing in IoT, up from 39%; and 33% are investing in 5G, up from 27%. From a regional perspective, businesses in Europe and Asia-Pacific are catching up with their peers in the Americas in terms of exposure to 5G, while a sector analysis reveals that the past year has seen a strong uptick in 5G investment in government and manufacturing.

At the same time, decision-making inside the enterprise is diffusing more widely across the C-suite, with 49% of CEOs now involved as top influencers of emerging technology strategy, including choice of vendors. Crucially, organizations where the CEO is a key decision-maker are further along the investment curve: 51% of businesses with CEOs closely involved in decision-making are investing in GenAI, compared to 44% of organizations where the CEO is less involved. Today, it seems new technologies are the responsibility of everybody on the leadership team — a shift that ICT suppliers need to recognize.

A mix of internal and external challenges prevent enterprises from scaling Industry 4.0 capabilities

Asked to cite the leading challenges to scaling trials in their organization, enterprises rank complexity and cost as the top two. These responses reflect the fact that many organizations still rely on legacy systems and suffer from organizational silos, both of which make the integration of new technologies more difficult. However, our findings also bring some important messages for ICT providers — with 33% feeling they don’t get enough support from their suppliers, and 37% rating technology immaturity as a major problem. Vendors should look to help enterprises address these external challenges, particularly given that only 12% of businesses are currently prioritizing collaboration with suppliers as a means of achieving scale.

A further consideration is that most businesses believe they have too many point solutions — a view expressed by 60% globally, rising to 69% in Asia-Pacific. While — as highlighted above — more areas of the business are now influencing digital infrastructure strategy, there’s a risk that this broadening of decision-making will actually reinforce existing siloes, leading in the longer term to more point solutions, not less. Again, vendors should take note.

Businesses lack clear understanding of the latest mobile technology and business model variants

As enterprises continue to assess the optimal use cases for 5G, the reality for ICT providers is that the next phase of successful 5G monetization will depend on a new wave of mobile infrastructure, deployment scenarios and business models. Deployment of 5G standalone (5G SA) networks is increasing in various regions of the world, with 151 operators now investing in the technology.¹ Globally, 84% of enterprises have high or moderate awareness of it, ahead of private networks at 79%. The level of familiarity with network application programming interfaces (APIs) is also promising, at 75%.

However, the degree of awareness is less encouraging for other emerging standards and business models. Network slicing has been presented as a unique selling point of 5G for some years, but knowledge of it is disappointingly low, with just 26% of respondents claiming high awareness. Other emerging concepts and technologies — the likes of network-as-a-service, Wi-Fi 7, and 5G Red Cap — rank even lower in terms of understanding, with 40% or more claiming low or no awareness. Given such findings, it’s essential for ICT providers to inform and educate their enterprise customers about how these latest digital infrastructure capabilities can enhance their transformation journeys.

Awareness of suppliers is low, complicating vendor selection – particularly for digital connectivity

Alongside low familiarity with the latest mobile technology innovations, enterprises are also struggling to make informed decisions about which ICT providers can help them on their transformation journey. A rising proportion of respondents (73%) say they need a better understanding of the changing supplier landscape, reflecting an environment where collaborative ecosystems featuring alliances between different technology providers are becoming the norm. Indeed, 56% of businesses believe they lack awareness of their technology suppliers’ additional partners, led by consumer products and retail businesses (67%).

Digital connectivity is a particular bugbear: businesses are more likely to struggle to identify the right vendor for 5G (64%) than for GenAI (42%), even though 5G has been available for far longer. This reflects a connectivity landscape where smaller digital infrastructure specialists and cloud vendors have emerged alongside telcos, network equipment vendors and IT providers in areas such as private wireless. Supplier preferences are unclear against this backdrop of broader choice: while mobile operators top score as preferred private network vendors, they are favored by only 28% of organizations.

Appetite for supplier consolidation means improving customer mindshare is critical

Beyond being a source of frustration, enterprises’ challenges around supplier awareness could ultimately feed into decisions to consolidate their vendor base. More than one-third (35%) of businesses across sectors are planning to reduce the number of ICT vendors they use in the coming 12 months, driven by efforts to improve security, lower overall expenditure and reduce technology complexity. Manufacturing (43%) and financial services organizations (42%) are both especially keen to do this.

The intention to focus spending on a smaller number of key suppliers makes it even more important that ICT providers present themselves as effective ecosystem orchestrators, able to provide end-to-end solutions with the assistance of partners and intermediaries. As part of this, suppliers should take care to underline capabilities that extend beyond their core products: 61% of businesses don’t believe vendors provide sufficient AI capabilities as part of their 5G or IoT solutions.

Next steps for ICT providers

While enterprises’ investment in emerging technologies is continuing to rise, they’re finding it hard to progress from trials to deployment — and are confused by a complex and varied vendor marketplace. To strengthen their offer to business customers, ICT suppliers should take the following steps:

Define yourself by the quality of your business outcomes

Enterprises value business outcomes above technology performance and cost benefits alone. Quantify the positive business outcomes your solutions deliver, while showing an understanding of the sector, sub-sector and the key performance indicators your customers value most. This may include sharing examples of how you have leveraged new technologies to improve your own systems, processes and performance, helping to position you as a business partner, not just a technology enabler.   

Engage with a broader range of enterprise buyers and influencers

A range of leadership perspectives now inform digital infrastructure ambitions, with implications for vendor selection as well. Build the right relationships with changing buyer groups as new demands relating to security or productivity complement long-standing customer needs around growth and efficiency. The ability to pre-empt and respond to a more composite set of customer demands should also feed into your solution development, maximizing the relevance of your offerings to different parts of the business.

Educate customers about new business models and technology combinations

While organizations are increasing their use of frontier technologies, many are still unaware of the benefits of new technology variants — from Wi-Fi 7 through to network slicing. Demystify these new capabilities by highlighting their potential to unlock additional value.  At the same time, recognize customers’ holistic view of various frontier technologies and how they interact with each other. By articulating the combined impact of connectivity, computing and AI, you can help enterprise customers unlock a new wave of benefits that take advantage of a range of hardware and software investments.

Prioritize scalability, security and sustainability in your value proposition

Enterprises highlight several needs that inform their choice of suppliers. Security is an essential vendor attribute, while more than two-thirds of organizations recognize that converting technology trials into pervasive organizational deployments is challenging. Sustainability is also an evolving concern, with businesses alert to the potentially ambivalent impact of emerging technologies on their ESG agenda. Your value proposition and engagement with enterprises should speak to these informing principles.

Focus on key verticals and ecosystem partners

Enterprises see ecosystem collaboration as a route to access new skills and capabilities, but lack understanding of changing supplier ecosystems, with many under pressure to consolidate vendors. In response, prioritize your ecosystem strategy and double down on key partners, adjusting your operating model and go-to-market strategy accordingly. Take care to isolate and regularly revisit the verticals you wish to serve, while ensuring you differentiate clearly between your sector-agnostic and vertical-specific capabilities.