Telecommunications providers (telcos) across the globe are entering a decisive period. Core connectivity revenues are flat, operating costs are rising, and customer expectations are set by digital-native companies, not traditional operators. As a result, telcos are concentrating IT spend on a small number of strategic initiatives that directly impact cost structure, customer experience, and future growth:

• Productizing AI to automate operations and personalize customer interactions.
• Digital and IT modernization to escape legacy OSS/BSS constraints.
• Customer experience transformation to reduce churn and improve lifetime value.
• Operational efficiency and automation to protect margins under flat revenue growth.
• New digital services and revenue streams beyond core connectivity.

Across all of these initiatives, success depends on the same foundation: reliable, secure, and observable orchestration of data and AI workflows at telecom scale.

Apache Airflow® has become the industry standard for data and AI orchestration. Astro, Astronomer’s unified orchestration platform, elevates Airflow into an telco-grade control plane purpose-built for regulated, hybrid, and high-scale environments.

Telcos are investing in AI to simultaneously move both margin and differentiation. In NVIDIA’s State of AI in Telecommunications survey, 77% of telecom respondents said AI helped reduce annual operating costs and 84% said it helped increase annual revenue. At the same time, generative AI is moving from experimentation into productized use: 49% of respondents reported they are actively adopting or assessing genAI, and among that group 84% plan to offer genAI services to customers.

Targeted AI use cases include

• AI-driven customer service: virtual agents, agent assist, and automated issue resolution.
• Network optimization: predictive maintenance, capacity planning, and self-optimizing networks.
• Fraud detection: real-time identification of SIM, subscription, and payment fraud.
• Personalization and churn prediction: targeted offers, dynamic pricing, and retention modeling.
• Internal automation: AI-assisted IT operations, field service, and back-office workflows.

The strategic aim is clear: use AI to automate assurance and operations (toward autonomous networks), and to transform customer service, sales, and marketing through personalization and natural-language experiences.

What Telcos Need and How Astro Helps

Despite strong executive intent, most telcos struggle to operationalize AI at scale. Skills shortages remain acute, with over half citing lack of AI expertise as a top barrier. Many pilots stall in production due to fragmented OSS/BSS data, inconsistent pipelines, and limited visibility once models are live.

Roughly one-third of IT leaders report that poor data quality and availability block AI value realization, even with massive data volumes . Regulatory and data sovereignty constraints further complicate execution, making ad hoc scripts and siloed ML tooling untenable for production use.

Airflow and Astro in Action

Based on the State of Airflow 2026 survey, AI and ML are the fastest growing workloads, now driving nearly a third of total Airflow usage. On Astro it’s even higher: 62% of Astro customers run AI/ML use cases on the platform, rising to 83% with data teams that have been using Astro since 2022.

Airflow is used by some of the most demanding AI companies and workloads on the planet:

• OpenAI has standardized on Airflow across its business with over 7,000 pipelines spanning research, operations, and finance, all while providing a foundation for 10x growth. Read more.
• GitHub relies on Airflow to process billions of developer events per day, orchestrating the feedback loops used to continuously improve Copilot. Read more.
• Apple uses Airflow to streamline experimentation with Jupyter Notebooks, boost productivity, and support large-scale, distributed ML workflows. Watch Apple’s session from the Airflow Summit to learn more.

The telecoms industry is following the same path:

A global provider of AI-powered cloud communications and contact centre solutions had relied on Control-M for orchestration, but high costs, limited flexibility, and constrained scalability were stalling cloud and AI/ML initiatives. As the company accelerated its AI transformation, legacy orchestration became a bottleneck it could no longer afford. The provider selected Astro with Observe, along with Astronomer Professional Services including a Center of Excellence, and a Kickstarter package, to migrate off Control-M and modernise its orchestration foundation.

The result was a step-change in performance and cost efficiency: 30% faster job runtimes and a 50% reduction in TCO, freeing the team to focus on AI/ML delivery rather than infrastructure management.

Telcos are modernizing IT and network architectures to increase delivery speed, reduce integration cost, and support automation and AI at scale. Legacy OSS/BSS systems were not designed for continuous change, hybrid execution, or real-time services. Modernization enables telcos to move toward cloud-native, API-driven operating models that support faster service launches and more efficient operations.

Industry studies found that only 22% of telcos have successfully delivered a digital transformation to date (well below the cross-industry average), yet 90% of them plan to invest heavily in infrastructure, cloud enablement, AI, big data, and modernizing their tech architecture going forward.

What Telcos Need and How Astro Helps

Most operators remain constrained by heavily customized OSS/BSS stacks and brittle point-to-point integrations. Change cycles are slow, upgrades are risky, and parallel transformation programs introduce duplicated data pipelines and inconsistent definitions. Hybrid environments further fragment execution and security controls. Without a unifying orchestration layer, modernization efforts stall under operational complexity rather than delivering speed.

Astro in Action

Telco data teams adopt Astro to eliminate the legacy schedulers that often cripple the ability to ship new data products and workflows. Moving from legacy orchestration systems such as AutoSys, Control-M, Informatica or Apache Oozie to Astro unlocks strategic and operational gains:

• Cut costs by up to 75%. Organizations moving to Astro typically realize major savings through reduced infrastructure, licensing, and operational overhead, freeing budget for innovation.
• Unblock agility and scale with cloud-native orchestration. As a modern orchestration platform, Astro gives teams the flexibility, resilience, and scalability needed to support fast-moving data and AI initiatives without the constraints of legacy tooling and manual overhead.
• Attract and retain top engineering talent. Code-first and open source, by using Airflow data teams recruit top talent more easily and onboard faster, while avoiding lock-in to niche or proprietary tech.

Commonly migrated workloads include ETL jobs, data warehouse loads and refreshes, report generation and distribution, batch file transfers (FTP/SFTP jobs), data validations and quality checks, time- or event-triggered job dependencies across systems, and mainframe and SAP job coordination.

No matter what workload or legacy orchestration tool your organization is using, Astronomer’s Professional Services team can help. The company’s experts can build an operational framework to smoothly and safely migrate your workloads to Astro.

Rapid Stand-Up of an Enterprise Orchestration Platform During Large-Scale Modernization
One of the largest broadband communications providers in the United States launched a managed Airflow platform as part of a broader modernization initiative. The challenge was platform readiness at telco scale: accelerating onboarding and standardizing operational foundations, including SSO integration, DNS and networking setup, and consistent workspace hygiene across teams and environments.

The provider selected Astro, using Astronomer's structured onboarding to stand up a governed, production-grade orchestration control plane quickly. The result was a faster path to a telco-ready platform and a materially lower ongoing management burden, freeing the team to focus on modernization priorities.

Figure 1: With the Astro platform, data teams work with a unified data stack to build, run, and observe all of their critical data pipelines across AI, app, and analytics workflows.

Customer experience has become a primary competitive battleground for telcos, directly impacting churn, lifetime value, and brand trust. According to industry research, 54% of telecommunications decision-makers say that improving customer experience is a top transformation initiative for their organization.

Operators are investing to shift from reactive, siloed service models to proactive, data-driven customer journeys that span digital and assisted channels. With limited pricing power in core connectivity, improving retention and cost-to-serve is one of the fastest ways to protect margins and stabilize revenue.

CX investments concentrate on proactive service assurance, personalized next-best-action journeys, AI-assisted customer care, customer 360 views, and churn prediction with automated intervention.

What Telcos Need and How Astro Helps

Customer data is fragmented across CRM, billing, provisioning, network assurance, and digital channels, making it difficult to act on real-time signals. Many CX initiatives rely on delayed or unreliable data pipelines, undermining trust in “customer health” metrics. Journey orchestration breaks down when workflows span multiple systems without consistent execution or observability. When incidents occur, poor coordination amplifies customer frustration and drives churn.

Astro in Action

One of the largest global internet backbone providers, operating dense networks across North America and Western Europe, needed reliable, timely data to power a customer-facing portal. The challenge was turning orchestration into dependable production infrastructure: scaling workflow execution, maintaining uptime, and ensuring visibility to protect the customer experience.

The team evaluated alternatives including Amazon MWAA and Azure Data Factory before prioritising a platform offering telco-grade operations and pipeline-aware observability without long-term maintenance burden. They adopted Astro for production orchestration and added Astro Observe to monitor pipeline health, SLAs, and data quality end-to-end. The result is a high-quality customer experience powered by fresh data, with improved operational visibility for the data team.

With flat revenue growth and rising infrastructure costs, telcos are prioritizing operational efficiency through automation. The goal is to reduce manual effort, minimize incidents, and run networks and IT systems more predictably at scale. Notably, efficiency is no longer just about cost-cutting: 61% of telcos are pursuing efficiency and new service development in parallel, using AI and digital transformation as links between the two goals. In other words, telcos see efficient operations as a foundation that frees up resources for innovation.

Automation efforts focus on standardized operational runbooks, coordinated batch and streaming execution, cost-aware scheduling, SLA enforcement, and incident response automation.

What Telcos Need and How Astro Helps

Operational workflows are often fragmented across schedulers, scripts, and domain-specific tools, creating inconsistent execution and limited visibility. Manual handoffs slow response times and increase error rates. Cost drivers across compute, storage, and energy are difficult to attribute to specific workflows, making optimization reactive rather than systematic.

Without centralized orchestration, automation efforts remain localized and fail to scale.

Astro in Action

A leading Western European telecommunications provider launched a cross-company data mesh program requiring secure, self-service orchestration across hundreds of teams without creating a centralised bottleneck. Their existing mix of Azure-native scheduling and fragmented Airflow footprints lacked telco-mandated controls — consistent RBAC, private connectivity, and repeatable deployment hygiene — slowing provisioning and increasing overhead.

The provider standardized on Astro and engaged Astronomer’s Center of Excellence (CoE) to deliver multi-tenant Airflow at scale, adding SSO/SCIM, private endpoints, and fully automated provisioning via API/CLI and Terraform. The result was a step-change in operational efficiency: 2,000+ Dags and 43K tasks migrated off legacy tooling, 250+ deployments unified under a governed platform, and environment provisioning cut from weeks to hours.

To offset stagnation in core connectivity, telcos are investing in new digital services. These services aim to reposition telcos as platform providers to enterprises and developers, monetizing network capabilities in programmable, productized ways. Use cases include:

• Private 5G delivery: automated provisioning, monitoring, and reporting.
• Edge and MEC solutions: low-latency analytics and vertical-specific applications.
• Network APIs: identity, quality-on-demand, and location services for developers.
• Partner ecosystems: onboarding, entitlements, revenue sharing.
• Vertical solutions: bundled connectivity, security, and analytics offerings.

What Telcos Need and How Astro Helps

Delivering digital services requires coordination across provisioning, assurance, billing, and partner systems, often across cloud, edge, and on-prem environments. Monetization depends on accurate usage metering, entitlement enforcement, and SLA reporting. Many telcos lack the operational workflows and observability needed to run these services reliably at scale, slowing go-to-market and eroding enterprise trust.

Astro in Action

A European provider of fixed and mobile services launched a new Snowflake data platform to support faster delivery of customer-facing and revenue-critical digital services. The team faced a common constraint: tight timelines and a relatively immature platform function, with the internal default standard (Azure Data Factory plus ad hoc tooling) likely to increase operational burden and slow iteration just as the business needed rapid delivery.

They selected Astro to provide a production-grade orchestration control plane for ingestion, transformation with dbt and downstream activation workflows, all without building and maintaining Airflow infrastructure themselves. The result is a faster path to a reliable, scalable data platform with materially lower operational overhead than alternative approaches, enabling the organization to standardize on Astro as new digital service requirements expand.

Each initiative in this guide shares the same requirements:

• Clean, timely, governed data
• Reliable, observable pipelines across systems and environments
• Security, compliance, and cost control built into execution

That is the role of orchestration. The telcos that win the next decade will treat orchestration as the control plane for AI, modernization, and service expansion, and they will operationalize it with platforms like Astro.

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