The Rise of Agentic BSS in the IQ Era: from Systems of Record to Systems of Outcome

Authors: Rode Kirk and Rick Lievano

Telecom Business Support Systems (BSS) are entering their most consequential transformation since digital billing. As networks become programmable, products become composable, and customers expect real‑time, personalized experiences, the traditional BSS stack—designed for linear processes and human‑driven workflows—has reached its limits. Agentic AI changes this equation.

Agentic BSS represents a new operating model where intelligent agents continuously sense, decide, and act across the commercial lifecycle—turning BSS from a system of record into a system of outcome. 

What the BSS Layer Signifies in Telecom

The BSS layer is the commercial and customer‑facing brain of a communications service provider. It governs how services are designed, sold, priced, ordered, billed, assured, and monetized across consumer, enterprise, and partner ecosystems. Core BSS domains include:

• Product and offer catalog management.
• Customer and account management
• Order management and orchestration.
• Charging, billing, and revenue management
• Partner and ecosystem settlement

The BSS Layer in Telecom

Modern BSS determines a Communications Service Provider’s (CSP) ability to launch new services quickly, monetize 5G and IoT, support B2B2X ecosystems, and deliver personalized digital experiences.

Why BSS Is Both Vital—and Inherently Complex

BSS complexity is not accidental; it reflects telecom reality:

1. Extreme process coupling across sales, fulfillment, billing, and care.
2. High‑volume, real‑time transactions at massive scale
3. Regulatory and financial precision with zero tolerance for error
4. Multi‑vendor stacks accumulated over decades.
5. Constant change driven by new pricing models, partners, and technologies.

Legacy BSS platforms were never designed for continuous optimization or autonomous decision making. As a result, CSPs often experience slow product launches, high operational costs, and fragmented customer journeys, as legacy technical debt persists—even after modernization efforts.

The Top Five Agentic BSS Use Cases

Agentic BSS introduces goal‑driven AI agents that operate across BSS domains, rather than within single applications.

1. Autonomous Quote‑to‑Order Orchestration - Agents interpret intent, validate eligibility, configure products, orchestrate orders across domains, and resolve exceptions in real time—dramatically reducing cycle times (see T-Mobile US Retail story).

2. Intelligent Revenue Assurance & Leakage Prevention - Agents continuously monitor usage, billing, and settlement patterns, detect anomalies, and initiate corrective actions before revenue is lost.

3. Adaptive Product & Pricing Optimization - Agents analyze demand, usage, and margin signals to dynamically recommend pricing, bundles, and promotions aligned to customer and market conditions.

4. Proactive Customer Lifecycle Management - Agents predict churn, trigger retention actions, personalize offers, and coordinate care interventions across channels.

5. Partner & Ecosystem Automation - Agents manage onboarding, contract compliance, usage settlement, and dispute resolution across B2B2X ecosystems—at machine speed.

These use cases shift BSS from reactive processing to continuous value optimization.

 

AI-powered agents are transforming T‑Mobile US retail operations by acting as real-time copilots for frontline employees, helping them serve customers faster, smarter, and with greater confidence. Embedded directly into point-of-sale and service workflows, these agents surface personalized recommendations, explain complex plans and promotions in plain language, and guide associates’ step‑by‑step through upgrades, activations, and troubleshooting. By instantly pulling from customer history, device data, and current offers, agents reduce training dependency, shorten transaction times, and ensure consistent, policy‑aligned interactions across stores. The result is a more empowered retail workforce—able to focus less on navigating systems and more on delivering the high‑touch, consultative experience that drives customer satisfaction, loyalty, and sales.

To learn more, see the full interview with T-Mobile’s Brian Hodel

How Microsoft Copilot Studio Enables Agentic BSS

Microsoft Copilot Studio (MCS) provides the orchestration layer for building, governing, and scaling agentic business processes. MCS democratizes AI by empowering every line‑of‑business owner to create AI agents that streamline and automate their work, turning domain expertise into measurable outcomes.

It enables organizations to:

• Design goal‑oriented agents that reason across BSS workflows.
• Connect securely to enterprise systems using connectors and APIs.
• Govern actions with enterprise‑grade security, identity, and compliance.
• Deploy agents across channels including Microsoft Teams and digital front ends.

With Model Context Protocol (MCP) now generally available in Microsoft’s Copilot Studio, agents can dynamically connect to external tools, knowledge servers, and APIs—automatically inheriting actions as systems evolve.

MCP enables AI agents to easily connect and use enterprise tools and applications

This significantly reduces time to value, eliminates brittle point integrations, and allows BSS innovation to move at cloud speed.

TM Forum, Open APIs, and Interoperability at Scale

Microsoft is an active participant in the TM Forum Open Digital Architecture (ODA) ecosystem. TM Forum Open APIs provide standardized interfaces for customer, product, order, and billing domains—forming the interoperability foundation for Agentic BSS.

Microsoft and TM Forum have demonstrated how Copilot technologies accelerate TM Forum Open API development, reducing boilerplate code and improving consistency across multi‑vendor environments.

In practice:

• Copilot Studio agents invoke TM Forum Open APIs via secure connectors.
• MCP enables dynamic discovery and execution of BSS actions.
• Agents remain decoupled from vendor‑specific implementations.

TM Forum states that MCP is becoming a foundational requirement for telecom, particularly for AI‑driven automation across BSS systems. As telecom operators and vendors experiment with agentic AI, the limiting factor is no longer AI’s ability to understand intent—but its inability to reliably and safely act on BSS systems without extensive custom integration. As explored in a recent article, MCP is a protocol must for telecommunications.

TMF621 Open APIs registered in Copilot Studio via MCP

 

IG1445 Open API & Model Context Protocol v1.0.0 explores how MCP complements and accelerates the vision of the TM Forum's Open Digital Architecture (ODA) Open API program.

Leading BSS Vendors in the Agentic Ecosystem

By leveraging connectors, exposed APIs or MCP Servers, Copilot Studio easily and securely integrates with leading third‑party BSS platforms, including:

These platforms increasingly expose TM Forum aligned Open APIs and MCP Servers, enabling agentic orchestration without replacing core systems.

Where MCP Accelerates Innovation

Model Context Protocol (MCP) acts as the agentic control plane between Copilot Studio and the BSS ecosystem. MCP enables:

• Real‑time access to BSS tools and data
• Automatic synchronization as APIs evolves.
• Secure, governed, low‑maintenance integrations.

This allows CSPs and partners to innovate above the BSS layer, without destabilizing it—unlocking faster experimentation, safer automation, and measurable business outcomes.

Putting it All Together: Microsoft Copilot Studio in Action

In partnership with Exos Systems, we have created an agentic BSS platform that demonstrates how AI agents built in Microsoft Copilot Studio can streamline and modernize core telecom BSS workflows. Refer to Exos Systems’ blog for additional insight into the TM Forum Open API MCP & API configuration and integration.

Exos Systems delivers telecom‑focused IT services and BSS/OSS integration, powered by Exosphere—its cloud‑native, AI‑ready digital platform built on TM Forum Open API and ODA standards and strengthened through a Microsoft partnership.

By integrating with TM Forum Open APIs and exposing capabilities through Microsoft 365 Copilot and Teams, the platform shows how conversational, human‑in‑the‑loop experiences can coexist with selective autonomous execution for event‑driven scenarios. The platform uses the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to decouple agents from vendor‑specific BSS implementations, enabling portability across BSS environments while maintaining governance, orchestration, and enterprise-grade access through Copilot Studio.

“With Microsoft Copilot Studio, telcos can rapidly create BSS agents that connect via MCP servers to leverage TM Forum Open APIs, delivering interoperability and simplicity—turning industry standards into real‑time, intelligent customer and business experiences in days rather than months. Exos Systems is delighted to partner with Microsoft to facilitate this journey.”

-Saleh Bari, CTO & Co-Founder

The initial scope is anchored by three role‑aligned agents that illustrate practical, high‑value BSS use cases:

1. Product Expert. Provides conversational access to product catalogs, eligibility, and guided upgrades.
2. Billing Expert. Help customer service representatives explain billing anomalies by correlating bills and usage data.
3. Order Expert. Supports both conversational order inquiries and autonomous remediation of failed orders.

Together, these agents demonstrate how agentic AI can reduce friction across products, billing, and order operations while accelerating time to value. To see Copilot Studio in action and learn more about how agentic BSS can transform telecom operations, visit the Microsoft booth at Mobile World Congress for a live demo – and see how everyone in your organization can create agents that transform their work.

Fleet of Agentic BSS agents for product management, bill management, and order management

 

Build Your Own Agent @ Mobile World Congress 2026

Step into the Microsoft booth and experience the future of AI firsthand with Build Your Own Agent. This interactive, hands-on experience puts you in the driver’s seat—showing how quickly you can design, customize, and deploy an AI agent tailored to your real business needs. In minutes, you will move from idea to action, connecting data, workflows, and intelligence to create an agent that works the way you do. Whether you are exploring AI for the first time or looking to scale agentic solutions across your organization, this is your chance to build, test, and walk away with a practical understanding of how AI agents can deliver real outcomes.

Join us at MWC for a fast-paced, hands-on workshop where you will build a fully functional Billing Analysis AI Agent from scratch using Microsoft Copilot Studio. Move beyond the hype and build agents to solve complex telecom challenges using no-code/low-code orchestration.

In this hands-on session, you will use Microsoft Copilot Studio to create an enterprise-grade agent that analyzes telecom billing data, detects anomalies, flags churn risks, and delivers role-specific insights—then publish it and access directly into Microsoft 365 Copilot.

What you will accomplish

• Accelerated launch: You will build, fine-tune, test, and deploy the agent in under 45 mins.
• Insight Focused: Train your agent to do real-world tasks like detect anomalies, predict churn risks, generate reports and more. 
• Advanced Orchestration: Ground agents in data and fine-tune prompt reasoning.
• Enterprise Activation: Publish your agent across organization and access using Microsoft 365 Copilot (UI for AI).

Walk away with a proven, repeatable architectural pattern you can apply to countless AI use cases across your business. 

Hardware

Microsoft will provide laptops for all participants. Participants may use their own devices if preferred; however, Microsoft will be unable to support any connectivity or device-related issues on personal equipment.

REGISTER HERE or visit the Microsoft booth (Hall 3 3H30) during the event if you are interested in participating in the workshop.