Reflections on Amy Cameron's keynote at the Polystar User Meeting 2026.
Widening the Lens on AI in Telecoms
By the time Amy Cameron, Managing Director of Research at STL Partners, took the stage in Lisbon, the Polystar User Meeting had already heard CPO Thomas Nilsson on where AI fits into the assurance roadmap. Cameron's job was to widen the lens. She came armed with two pieces of fresh research: a survey of operators, vendors, and analysts conducted the week before at FutureNet World, and a structured analysis of every agentic AI announcement made at this year's Mobile World Congress (MWC).
She has spent years analyzing AI in telecoms - long before it became the industry’s defining theme. Her opening observation was telling: the rooms of people working on this topic used to be much smaller.
The survey mapped AI penetration across operational domains. The headline pattern was familiar - customer experience and business support systems (BSS) at the top, network deployment at the bottom. Customer-facing systems moved to the cloud first, so AI followed naturally.
What was less expected, Cameron said, was the maturity gap on AI governance. Very few respondents could describe what STL Partners considers optimized governance: clear policies, a centralized inventory of deployed models, regular audits, and defined ownership for monitoring drift and bias. Most operators sit somewhere in the middle, with policies in place but inconsistent oversight.
That matters more than it might sound. Cameron's data showed a stronger correlation between overall AI maturity and governance maturity than between AI maturity and cloud platform maturity. Cloud platforms make AI deployable. Governance is what makes AI trustworthy enough for operators to take humans out of the loop. Without that trust, autonomous operations remain an aspiration.