Reimagining Telco with Microsoft: AI, TM Forum ODA, and Developer Innovation

The telecom industry is undergoing a seismic shift—driven by AI, open digital architectures, and the urgent need for scalable, customer-centric innovation. At the heart of this transformation is TM Forum Innovate Americas 2025, a flagship event bringing together global leaders to reimagine the future of connectivity.

Microsoft’s presence at this year’s event is both strategic and visionary. As a key partner in the telecom ecosystem, Microsoft is showcasing how its technologies—spanning AI, cloud, and developer tools—are enabling Communication Service Providers (CSPs) to modernize operations, accelerate innovation, and deliver exceptional customer experiences.

🔑 Key Themes Shaping the Conversation

• Connected Intelligence: Microsoft is championing a new model of collaboration—one where AI systems, teams, and technologies work together seamlessly to solve real-world problems. This approach breaks down silos and enables intelligent decision-making across the enterprise.
• AI-First Mindset: From network optimization to customer service, Microsoft is helping telcos embed AI into the fabric of their operations. The focus is on building shared data platforms, connected models, and orchestration frameworks that scale.
• Customer Experience & Efficiency: With rising expectations and increasing complexity, CSPs must deliver faster, smarter, and more personalized services. Microsoft’s solutions are designed to enhance agility, reduce friction, and elevate the end-user experience.

As the event unfolds, Microsoft’s sessions and showcases will highlight how these themes come to life—through real-world implementations, collaborative frameworks, and developer-first tools.

Thought Leadership & Sessions

Connected Intelligence & Azure AI Foundry: Scaling AI Across the Telco Enterprise

T-Mobile and Microsoft are spotlighting a transformative approach to enterprise AI: Connected Intelligence. The joint session explores how telcos can break down silos and unlock the full potential of AI by enabling strategic collaboration across systems, teams, and technologies.

The core challenge they address is clear: AI in isolation cannot answer even the simplest customer questions. Whether it's billing, device performance, or network coverage, fragmented systems lead to blind spots, duplication, and poor customer outcomes. To overcome this, they propose a unified framework that blends technology and culture—because tech alone doesn’t scale, and culture alone doesn’t transform.

Azure AI Foundry: The Engine Behind Connected Intelligence

At the heart of this vision is Microsoft’s Azure AI Foundry, a shared AI platform designed to scale intelligence across the enterprise and a core component of Microsoft’s recently announced Network Operations Agent Framework. Connected Intelligence integrates:

• Agent Frameworks and Agent Catalogs for modular AI deployment
• Hundreds of TBs of daily data from network switches, device logs, and location records
• Enterprise-grade orchestration and data governance
• AI/ML models aligned with customer-level time series events

This architecture enables reuse, speed, and alignment across people, organizations, and systems—turning data into actionable intelligence.

Model Context Protocol (MCP): AI-to-AI Collaboration

A standout innovation is the Model Context Protocol (MCP), which goes beyond traditional APIs. While APIs connect systems through data, MCP connects intelligence through context. It allows AI agents to dynamically discover and chain APIs without custom coding, enabling real-time collaboration across network operations, device management, and deployment workflows.

By integrating MCP into the API fabric, Microsoft is laying the groundwork for agentic AI—where intelligent systems can autonomously interact, adapt, and scale across the telco ecosystem.

From Hype to Impact: Operationalizing AI in Telco with TM Forum’s ODA and Open APIs

The telecom industry is moving from hype to impact by operationalizing AI through TM Forum’s Open Digital Architecture (ODA) and Open APIs. The session, From hype to impact: operationalizing AI in telco with TM Forum’s ODA and Open APIs, explores how telcos can build AI-ready architectures, unlock data value for automation and AI agents, and scale responsibly with governance and ethics at the core.

Microsoft’s collaboration with TM Forum is enabling telcos to modernize OSS/BSS systems using the ODA Canvas—a modular, cloud-native execution environment orchestrated with AI and powered by Microsoft Azure. This architecture supports plug-and-play integration of differentiated services, reduces integration costs by over 30%, and boosts developer productivity by more than 40% with GitHub Copilot. 

Learn how leading telcos like Telstra are scaling AI solutions such as “One Sentence Summary” and “Ask Telstra” across their contact centers and retail teams. These solutions, built on Azure AI Foundry, have delivered measurable impact: 90% of employees reported time savings and increased effectiveness, with a 20% reduction in follow-up contacts. Telstra’s success is underpinned by a modernized data ecosystem and strong governance frameworks that ensure ethical and secure AI deployment.

From Chaos to Clarity with Observability

Despite advances in operational tooling, fragmented observability remains a persistent challenge. Vendors often capture telemetry in incompatible formats, forcing operations teams to rely on improvised log aggregators and custom parsers that drive up costs and hinder rapid incident resolution. Microsoft’s latest contribution to the Open Digital Architecture (ODA) initiative directly tackles this issue with the ODA Observability Operator, now available as open source on GitHub. By enforcing a standardized logging contract, integrating seamlessly with Azure Monitor, and surfacing health metrics through TM Forum nonfunctional APIs, the operator streamlines telemetry across systems. Early trials have shown promising results—carriers significantly reduced the time needed to detect billing anomalies, enabling teams to shift from reactive troubleshooting to proactive optimization.

Accelerating TM Forum Open API Development with GitHub Copilot

As the telecom industry embraces open standards and modular architectures, Microsoft is empowering developers to move faster and smarter with GitHub Copilot—an AI-powered coding assistant that’s transforming how TM Forum (TMF) Open APIs are built and deployed.

Why GitHub Copilot for TM Forum Open APIs?

TMF Open APIs are a cornerstone of interoperability in telecom, offering over 100 standardized RESTful interfaces across domains like customer management, product catalog, and billing. But implementing these APIs can be time-consuming and repetitive.

GitHub Copilot streamlines this process by:

• Autocompleting boilerplate code for TMF endpoints
• Suggesting API handlers and data models aligned with TMF specs
• Generating test plans and documentation
• Acting as an AI pair programmer that understands your code context

This means developers can focus on business logic while Copilot handles the heavy lifting.

Real-World Uses

Telco developers benefit from powerful features in GitHub Copilot that streamline the development of TMF Open API services. One such feature is Agent Mode, which automates complex, multi-step tasks such as implementing TMF API flows, running tests, and correcting errors—saving developers significant time and effort. Another key capability is Copilot Chat, which provides conversational support directly within the IDE, helping developers debug code, validate against TMF specifications, and follow best practices with ease. Together, these tools enhance productivity and reduce friction in building compliant, scalable telecom solutions.

For example, when building a Customer Management microservice using the TMF629 API, Copilot can suggest endpoint handlers, validate field names against the spec, and even help write README documentation or unit tests.

📈 Proven Productivity Gains

CSPs like Proximus have reported significant productivity improvements using GitHub Copilot in their Network IT functions:

• 20–30% faster code writing
• 25–35% faster refactoring
• 80–90% improvement in documentation
• 40–50% gains in code compliance

Other telcos like Vodafone, NOS, Orange, TELUS, and Lumen Technologies are also leveraging Copilot to accelerate innovation and reduce development friction.

Best Practices for TMF API Projects

To get the most out of Copilot:

• Use it for repetitive tasks and pattern recognition
• Always validate generated code against TMF specs
• Keep relevant spec files open to improve suggestion accuracy
• Use Copilot Chat for guidance on security, error handling, and optimization

GitHub Copilot is more than a coding assistant—it’s a catalyst for telco transformation. By combining AI with TMF’s open standards, Microsoft is helping developers build faster, smarter, and more consistently across the telecom ecosystem.

Learn more about how to configure and use GitHub Copilot in your own TMF Open API projects in our latest tech community blog.

Microsoft’s Broader Vision for Telco Transformation

Microsoft’s contributions reflect a comprehensive strategy to reshape the telecom landscape through scalable intelligence, open collaboration, and developer empowerment.

At the core of Microsoft’s vision is the idea that AI must be connected, contextual, and reusable. The Azure AI Foundry and Model Context Protocol (MCP) exemplify this approach by enabling telcos to:

• Harness massive volumes of time-series data from networks, devices, and customer interactions
• Deploy modular AI agents that can collaborate across systems
• Orchestrate workflows that adapt in real time to changing conditions

This architecture transforms fragmented data into actionable insights, allowing CSPs to move from reactive operations to proactive intelligence.

Conclusion: Microsoft’s Strategic Alignment with TM Forum

Microsoft’s participation at TM Forum Innovate Americas 2025 reflects a deep commitment to transforming the telecom industry through AI-first innovation, open collaboration, and developer empowerment.

From T-Mobile’s vision for Connected Intelligence, to Microsoft’s roadmap for operationalizing AI and ODA, and the developer-centric acceleration enabled by GitHub Copilot, Microsoft is helping Communication Service Providers (CSPs) move faster, scale smarter, and deliver better customer experiences.

By aligning with TM Forum’s goals—standardization, interoperability, and autonomous operations—Microsoft is not just participating in the conversation; it’s helping lead it.

📣 Call to Action

Join Microsoft and other industry leaders at TM Forum Innovate Americas 2025 to explore the future of telco transformation. Whether you're a strategist, technologist, or developer, this is your opportunity to connect, learn, and shape what’s next.