- BT will push its reputation as a trusted company to compete against new entrants
- TIM will stress its trusted status in the new world of AI
- Service providers are the “trusted entity” in the value AI chain, said a Cisco executive.
DTW IGNITE 2026, COPENHAGEN, DENMARK — Sometimes you can tell the theme of an event simply by counting how many times a word is used. In the case of TM Forum’s annual event this week, speakers at the morning keynote session used the word “trust” more than 50 times in a two-hour period. The word was used in reference to competition, security threats and telcos' place in the AI value chain.
The U.K. has more than 60 MVNOs, along with "a countless number” of small fiber broadband alt-nets, and they’re all fighting for their slice of the market, said Claire Gillies, CEO for Consumer with the BT Group. “It's BT’s ambition to grow, and that is driving us to achieve the goal of being the U.K.'s most trusted telco provider. And you're going to hear that word ‘trust’ again and again as we push it forward,” she said.
Gillies also used the word “trust” in regard to protecting people from internet scams. BT sees more than 1.9 billion attempts to attack its domains each year, and more than 200 million text scams, she said. “Customers are vulnerable to these, and as AI progresses, not only does it help us prevent scams, but it's helping bad actors as well accelerate them, and so at the core of telcos is trust with our customers. It's now time for us to pivot into that.”
Pietro Labriola, CEO & managing director of Italy’s TIM, participated in a conversation about AI. He said, “We have to move to the next level of the game. We're moving from connectivity to trusted digital infrastructure. In this trust ecosystem, speed is not enough. You are asking how much can I trust the connectivity and the solution.”
Jan Hofmeyr, VP for Telecommunications at AWS, noted that Swisscom is a customer of AWS and that data sovereignty is core to Swisscom’s priorities.
“They know that they can trust us for how their data is used,” said Hofmeyr.
Brian Meaney, global chief architect and CTO for Mass Scale Infrastructure with Cisco, talked about helping its customers when there is a problem. He said, “It's about operating, it's about adapting, but it's also about recovering when something happens. Is it a failure? Is it an attack? It's about trust. And it took us a while to come to this word ‘trust’, but trust means secure data, secure users, secure workloads.”
He also said that service providers are the “trusted entity” in the AI chain between data centers, interconnection sites, hyperscalers and neoclouds. He said telcos “are the ones that actually have the foundation of trust, be it within their country, be it within their theater, or within their geography, and that is profound.”
Was it a coordinated message that so many telecom leaders talked about “trust” at today’s TM Forum event? We don’t know. But it seems like a branding angle that service providers plan to push as they find their place in the new world of AI.