Modernise to Monetise: Hansen’s Takeaways from DTW Ignite 2026

Modernise to Monetise:
Hansen’s Takeaways from DTW Ignite 2026

Reflections from the Hansen Technologies team after three days at TM Forum’s DTW Ignite 2026, Bella Center, Copenhagen.

DTW Ignite 2026 confirmed what the industry has been circling for a while: the AI conversation in telecoms has moved from whether to how. The questions operators brought to our stand were less about possibility and more about control – how to scale AI across the estate without losing governance, when to build versus buy, and how to modernise systems that were never built for the pace the business now demands. That maps neatly onto the theme we took to Copenhagen: modernise to monetise.

Here are the takeaways that defined the show for us, framed around the industry themes our CTO, Brian Cappellani, explored on the Vision Stage, alongside Telefonica Germany’s Ashish Kar – and the commercial reality our customers are navigating underneath them.

The takeaways at a glance

• AI is in execution mode, not experimentation – it’s becoming core infrastructure across BSS, OSS and the network.

• Governance has to be designed in, not bolted on – operators need one consistent control plane across a fragmented, multi-vendor AI estate.

• The autonomy boundary is set by consequence – keep a human in the loop wherever a decision carries material customer, financial or regulatory impact.

• It’s not build versus buy – it’s build, buy and federate.

• Modernisation is a choice of path, not a single blueprint – composable BSS/OSS or a unified BSS digital backbone. Two paths, one outcome.

• The network is a monetisation opportunity – Digitalk Mobile Cloud turns MVNO onboarding into wholesale revenue.

AI is in execution mode – and governance is the hard part

As Brian put it, AI is no longer a set of isolated experiments; it is becoming core infrastructure for communications service providers. It now sits in BSS, OSS and the network, arriving from every direction at once – deployed by network vendors, embedded by software vendors, and built by CSPs themselves, across hyperscaler platforms and their own servers. The question we heard most wasn’t “can we use AI?” but “how do we operationalise AI from multiple vendors, consistently and under control?”

“Governance cannot be something added later, after agents are already live. It needs to be designed into the architecture.” – Brian Cappellani, CTO, Hansen Technologies

Scaling AI responsibly means putting a consistent control plane around all that fragmented AI – model governance, data protection, observability, auditability, cost control and human oversight – before agents are in production. Hansen’s architectural view is that AI should operate through trusted systems of record and governed interfaces, not bypass them: agents reason about what needs to happen, while deterministic business systems still execute the how, applying the rules, permissions and audit trails.

Where the industry is deliberately keeping humans in the loop

“Agentic” does not mean “unsupervised.” The boundary between assistive and autonomous action should be drawn on three criteria: consequence, reversibility and confidence. AI can already add value safely by summarising information, diagnosing failed orders or generating configuration proposals – with a person in control of the outcome. But where a decision carries material customer, financial or regulatory impact – applying credits, changing a contract, retiring a live offer – it needs approval gates, role-based access and a clear audit trail. Over time, actions graduate from recommendation to approved execution, to supervised autonomy. The goal isn’t to remove humans everywhere; it’s to place human judgement where it matters most.

Build, buy or federate – and the sovereignty question

On the Vision Stage, Brian joined the build-buy-federate panel and, with Ashish Kar (VP, Head of BSS & AI Solutions), shared the stage with Telefónica Germany on AI strategy and governance at scale. Ashish proudly talked about the launch of ‘Jarvis’ – their in-house fabric for Agentic AI SDLC, Applied COTS AI and Application Operation Stability. Read more about this here (subscription required). Brian’s viewpoint on the debate about build-versus-buy is that it has to be a mix. CSPs should build where AI is a strategic differentiator and keep the internal capability to govern it – but they shouldn’t build everything. Vendor AI grounded in the systems of record, that already understands catalog structures, quote validation or provisioning fallout, is often the fastest route to value.

“The right model is not build versus buy. It’s build, buy and federate.”

The same logic applies to where AI runs. What forces a workload private or on-premise – sovereignty, data sensitivity, latency, economics – shouldn’t fragment the estate into disconnected AI islands. As Brian framed it: sovereignty should not mean isolation, and flexibility should not mean lock-in.

What is Hansen Cortex?

Hansen Cortex is the enterprise-grade AI platform Hansen is building to support agentic AI across its product portfolio. It is the layer through which Hansen’s agents are built, deployed, governed and monitored, designed to make AI operational inside the OSS and BSS workflows operators already run. It provides multi-model support, orchestration for multi-step workflows, MCP-based integration, role-based access, auditability, observability, human-approval steps, and deployment across cloud, hybrid and on-premise. Hansen already has generally available agent capability around Catalog and Provision, and is expanding into catalog rationalisation, CPQ assistance and order-management troubleshooting. Hansen Cortex was introduced at DTW Ignite 2026, with general availability planned for October 2026.

Two paths, one outcome: composable B/OSS or a unified BSS digital backbone

Operators aren’t all standing in the same place, so Hansen offers two routes to the same destination. A Tier-1 carrying decades of M&A integration debt can’t rip out and replace a live stack – so Hansen’s composable suite of B/OSS solutions including Catalog, CPQ, Order Management, Provisioning, Billing, Portfolio and Informatics, all aligned to TM Forum’s Open Digital Architecture (ODA), helps CSPs modernise their estate one domain at a time. A challenger, fixed operator or MVNO has the opposite problem – so our unified BSS digital backbone – a complete cloud-, API- and AI-powered platform spanning care, billing, revenue management, catalog, order management and lifecycle management, with low/no-code configuration – lets business teams launch new offers in days rather than weeks.

“Two paths, one outcome. The route is the operator’s to choose; the digital backbone they end up with is the same.” – Scott Weir, President, Communications & Media, Hansen Technologies

We also brought those same ODA-aligned components to TM Forum’s Spatial Web: Open Gateway to the Immersive Future Catalyst – a catalog-driven orchestration layer that manages order journeys as process flows.

Digitalk Mobile Cloud: turning the network into wholesale revenue

Given how many MNOs walk the DTW floor, one of our busiest demos was Digitalk Mobile Cloud, the MVNE-as-a-Service platform from Digitalk: be the enabler, not the integrator. It’s a multi-tenant platform that lets an MNO host many MVNOs on a single instance, opening new wholesale revenue streams from assets they already own. Because one platform serves every tenant, the MNO avoids the costly one-to-one integrations that used to make smaller partners unviable – bringing subscriber bases of around 300,000 within reach, up to the millions.

The throughline: modernise to monetise

Modernisation only matters if it lets you monetise faster, and AI only matters if you can operate it under control. Whether an operator chooses the composable precision or the unified BSS backbone route, or a new wholesale line with Digitalk Mobile Cloud, the destination is the same – a cloud, AI and API-powered backbone that turns complexity into commercial agility. With 50+ years in telco, TM Forum ODA-certified APIs and proven Tier-1 and Tier-2 deployments, Hansen’s role is to help CSPs transform on their own terms, without betting the business. Hear more from Scott Weir, President of Communications & Media at Hansen, in an executive Q&A with TM Forum.