From ideas to impact: TM Forum Excellence Awards recognize the industry leaders delivering real-world results

19th annual Excellence Awards celebrate telco innovation demonstrating measurable production impact across AI, autonomy and composable architectures.

COPENHAGEN, DENMARK, June 24, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- TM Forum announced the winners of its 19th Annual Excellence Awards at DTW Ignite 2026, celebrating the organizations and individuals turning bold ideas into real-world impact.

Winning entries showed tangible evidence of how telcos and their partners are moving beyond pilots and proof-of-concepts, with production deployments delivering measurable gains in time-to-market, service availability, automation, customer experience, revenue growth and disaster response.

“The TM Forum Excellence Awards are a powerful measure of the real change starting to take place in our industry” said Nik Willetts, CEO, TM Forum. “These awards celebrate more than success, they spotlight bold, AI-driven initiatives and the teams behind them that are reshaping how our industry operates and grows. Huge congratulations to all our finalists and winners!”

As a neutral, non-profit organization, TM Forum's Excellence Awards are judged by an independent panel of 31 industry experts and celebrate the success of pioneering projects that are delivering real business results for the telecoms industry.

This year, 165 entries from 56 organizations reflected an industry moving from ambition to execution through accelerating adoption of autonomous networks, growing momentum behind composable IT and ecosystems, and clear evidence of AI moving from pilot to trusted production at scale.

2026 Excellence Award winners

Excellence in transformation with ODA: Infosys and BT Group

SRIMS - Redefining OSS with TM Forum Standards, Agility, and Innovation.

Infosys and BT Group took TM Forum’s Open Digital Architecture from blueprint to business reality. Their SRIMS platform has been in production for five years, delivering 16x faster time-to-market, $3.5 million in cost savings, and a 75% reduction in total cost of ownership through greater operational efficiency and sustainability.

Excellence in AI and data for business impact: Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison

IOH Next Generation Operations Evolution: Cutting Edge AgenticOps Amplify Transformation Outcome.

Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison advanced AI-driven telecom operations through multi-agent collaboration and digital twin technology. Its solution brings real-time network intelligence and structured decision-making to complex operating environments, achieving over 80% autonomous fault resolution. The upgraded network operations center now processes 126,000 anomalies each month with more than 90% diagnostic accuracy, while reducing customer complaints by 50%.

Excellence in customer and developer experience: Google Fiber and Netcracker

Experience-Led Autonomy at Scale: How Google Fiber and Netcracker Transformed Customer and Developer Experience through AI-Native, ODA-Driven Operations.

Google Fiber and Netcracker transformed customer and developer experience through an AI-native, ODA-driven operating model. The solution delivers 99.999% service availability, reduces service activation from days to hours, and enables more than 90% zero-touch provisioning. By accelerating fault resolution, streamlining network planning, and lowering operational costs, the entry clearly demonstrates the commercial viability of autonomous operations at scale.

Excellence in composable ecosystems for new revenues: Telstra

Code, Compose, Grow: The "Inversion of Control" Engine for Industrialized Innovation.

Telstra redefined how network-powered products are created and monetized through a fully composable, ODA-aligned architecture. By empowering product teams to design and launch services independently using network APIs, the initiative removes traditional engineering bottlenecks and accelerates innovation. In more than 12 months of deployment, it has reduced time-to-market by 80%, cut complex API delivery timelines from 10 months to two, and generated multi-million-dollar net-new revenue through programmable connectivity at scale.

Excellence in people, profit and planet: Telkomsel

Early Warning System Driving Sustainable Business Continuity.

Telkomsel deployed an AI-powered early warning system that strengthens disaster response and business continuity across Indonesia. By combining internal and external data sources, the platform provides real-time monitoring, prediction, and alerts for hazards including earthquakes and floods. Covering 270 million people, it detected 1,500 incidents across 514 cities and issued 10 million alerts in its first year, clearly demonstrating how AI can deliver measurable value for business, society, and the environment.

Excellence in autonomous networks: China Telecom and Huawei

To AN Level 4 and Beyond: How 900+ AI Agents Have Transformed China Telecom’s Operations.

China Telecom and Huawei stood out with a nationwide autonomous network deployment that demonstrated scale, maturity, and proven impact. The entry demonstrated advanced Autonomous Network capabilities at Level 4, combining strong real-world evidence, high usage, and clear operational benefits with genuine innovation. Its alignment to real deployments, measurable business impact, AI-driven architecture, and TM Forum standards made it the clear standout.

Excellence in regional impact I: Vodafone Türkiye

Transforming Operations and Driving Growth with AI-driven Unified Customer Insight.

Vodafone Türkiye has modernized customer experience operations across multiple functions, built on more than 100 network performance indicators. The entry demonstrated how AI-driven unified customer insight can connect network performance to business outcomes, resulting in NPS uplift, churn reduction, and significantly improved mean-time-to-resolution. It showed regional impact through practical, measurable progress.

Excellence in regional impact II: stc and IBM

Autonomous Networks in Action: AIOps Closed-Loop Fault Remediation and Auto-Healing.

IBM and stc deployed a regional autonomous network program built on Open Digital Architecture and closed-loop automation. Their AIOps solution processes approximately 2.1 million alarms per day and has delivered a 50% reduction in mean-time-to-repair, a 50% reduction in manual interventions, and 99.2% fault localization accuracy. The initiative provided a strong proof point for ODA as a practical framework for delivering business value.

For the complete list of this year's finalists, visit: https://www.tmforum.org/about/awards-and-recognition/excellence-awards/excellence-awards-finalist-2026/

Katy Branson
TM Forum
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