TM Forum names 2026 Excellence Awards winners

TM Forum announced the winners of its 19th Annual Excellence Awards at DTW Ignite 2026 in Copenhagen, highlighting telco projects with measurable production impact in AI, autonomous networks and composable architectures. The winners showed gains in service availability, time-to-market, automation, customer experience and revenue growth across global operators and technology partners.

Why it matters: - The awards highlight a shift in telecom from pilots to production systems that are already changing operations and revenue. - Winning projects showed measurable gains in automation, service reliability, customer experience, time-to-market and disaster response. - TM Forum said the results reflect growing adoption of autonomous networks, composable IT and AI at scale.

What happened: - TM Forum announced the winners of its 19th Annual Excellence Awards at DTW Ignite 2026 in Copenhagen, Denmark. - The awards recognized organizations and individuals delivering real-world impact across the telecom industry. - TM Forum said 165 entries from 56 organizations competed this year. - The organization said the awards were judged by an independent panel of 31 industry experts. - TM Forum released the complete list of finalists.

The details: - Excellence in transformation with ODA: Infosys and BT Group won for SRIMS, a platform that took TM Forum’s Open Digital Architecture from blueprint to production. - Infosys and BT Group said SRIMS has been in production for five years. - The platform delivered 16x faster time-to-market, $3.5 million in cost savings and a 75% reduction in total cost of ownership. - Excellence in AI and data for business impact: Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison won for an AI-driven operations model using multi-agent collaboration and digital twin technology. - The solution delivers more than 80% autonomous fault resolution. - The upgraded network operations center processes 126,000 anomalies each month with more than 90% diagnostic accuracy. - The system reduced customer complaints by 50%. - Excellence in customer and developer experience: Google Fiber and Netcracker won for an AI-native, ODA-driven operating model. - The solution delivers 99.999% service availability. - Service activation now takes hours instead of days. - More than 90% of provisioning is zero-touch. - Excellence in composable ecosystems for new revenues: Telstra won for a fully composable, ODA-aligned architecture built to create and monetize network-powered products. - Telstra said product teams can design and launch services independently using network APIs. - In more than 12 months of deployment, the initiative cut time-to-market by 80%. - Complex API delivery timelines fell from 10 months to two. - The program generated multi-million-dollar net-new revenue from programmable connectivity. - Excellence in people, profit and planet: Telkomsel won for an AI-powered early warning system that supports disaster response and business continuity across Indonesia. - The platform combines internal and external data to monitor, predict and alert for hazards including earthquakes and floods. - The system covers 270 million people. - In its first year, it detected 1,500 incidents across 514 cities and issued 10 million alerts. - Excellence in autonomous networks: China Telecom and Huawei won for a nationwide autonomous network deployment. - The entry demonstrated Level 4 autonomous network capabilities. - TM Forum said the submission stood out for real-world evidence, high usage, operational benefits and alignment with TM Forum standards. - Excellence in regional impact I: Vodafone Türkiye won for AI-driven unified customer insight. - The work uses more than 100 network performance indicators to connect network performance to business outcomes. - The initiative produced NPS uplift, lower churn and better mean-time-to-resolution. - Excellence in regional impact II: stc and IBM won for AIOps closed-loop fault remediation and auto-healing. - The program is built on Open Digital Architecture and closed-loop automation. - The AIOps solution processes about 2.1 million alarms per day. - It cut mean-time-to-repair by 50%, reduced manual interventions by 50% and reached 99.2% fault localization accuracy.

Between the lines: - TM Forum is signaling that telecom buyers and investors want proof of production impact, not just technology promises. - The mix of winners shows AI is moving from support tools into core network operations and customer systems. - Composable architecture is emerging as a business model enabler, not just an IT design choice.

What's next: - TM Forum said the winning projects can serve as reference points for operators moving toward autonomous, AI-enabled and more modular networks. - The finalists list offers a broader view of which deployments are gaining traction across the industry.

The bottom line: - The 2026 awards show telecom innovation is being judged less on experimentation and more on measurable results in live networks and operations.