Agentic AI: Telco's next leap or automation in disguise? A live discussion

"The next significant shift in network management won’t come from new unicorn terms but from software that’s built differently." – Geoff Hollingworth, CMO, Rakuten Symphony

Agentic AI is the latest buzzword making the rounds post-MWC 2025, with promises of autonomous agents that make decisions, collaborate and optimize networks. But is it really something new or just telecom automation repackaged with an enticing label?

Rakuten Symphony CMO Geoff Hollingworth was our guest on this week’s Zero-Touch Live as we unpacked his recent newsletter article that examines the underlying mental model shift and software evolution that would need to accompany agentic AI to make it fundamentally different.

The replay is available now below:

Arriving at agentic AI value

The interview aimed to surface the meaningful advancements that could point to a fundamental shift in how we build intelligent systems.

Key takeaways from the conversation:

🔹 How AI itself thinks of agentic AI. Geoff recounted his experience asking xAI’s Grok to code a basic agentic system, receiving back a simple rules-based program that seemed hardly groundbreaking. This underscored the point that many so-called agentic functions already exist in telecom automation.

🔹 The significance of a shift to Software 2.0. As agentic AI gains traction as a marketing term, there is a tech breakthrough happening in the move from traditional, rule-based software (Software 1.0) to data-driven development (Software 2.0). Rather than coding logic line-by-line, models are being trained on massive datasets to learn, adapt and generalize.

🔹 The potential for familiar use cases to evolve. While agentic AI examples like network optimization, customer service bots and fraud detection are use cases we’ve seen before, the new twist is that, powered by data and new toolkits, these systems have potential to become more autonomous and scalable. However, it can’t work without structured, relevant data.

Moving past the hype

The interview closed with Geoff underscoring that the real opportunity lies in embracing software built on data, not slogans: “Don’t invest in the buzz, invest in the shift that’s actually happening."

📺 Watch the full episode now and tag Geoff Hollingworth in the comments to join the discussion.