Innovate Americas 2026: Legacy IT is blocking Americas telcos from turning AI into growth
TM Forum research finds 88% of CIOs across the Americas say legacy IT lock-in is holding back new customer value, commercial impact and the race to autonomous enterprise
TM Forum research, released ahead of Innovate Americas 2026 in Dallas (October 6-7), shows legacy IT lock-in and complexity are now major barriers to AI-powered growth for US carrier organizations.
For telcos, AI can open up new revenue opportunities, speed innovation and enhance agility, but legacy IT must be simplified before carriers can turn ambition into commercial impact.
The Reinventing IT in the AI era report on telco CIO priorities reveals the Americas as a region where AI is strategically urgent, but still constrained by legacy IT, fragmented systems and governance challenges.
Among the region’s telco CIOs, 81% acknowledge dependence on legacy vendors and systems integrators, while 88% say migrating from closed legacy systems is difficult — well above global averages of 66% and 73%. The findings highlight legacy IT lock-in as the region’s sharpest modernization challenge, slowing how quickly carriers can scale AI, launch new services and monetize network capabilities.
The region’s CIOs are prioritizing the work needed to move AI from experimentation to commercial impact, with investment focused on customer experience (58%), IT modernization and technical debt reduction (54%), and faster time to market (50%).
“The race to the autonomous enterprise will be won by operators that can translate AI ambition into operational reality. That requires a deliberate re-Invent IT strategy: modernizing the IT estate, reducing fragmentation, establishing trusted governance, and creating the foundations for AI to scale safely, autonomously, and commercially across the business,” says Willie Stegmann, EVP, Composable IT and Ecosystems at TM Forum.
In the Americas, governance is the top barrier to AI adoption, cited by 47% of operators, while skills lead globally at the same level. The finding points to a sharper regional challenge of governing AI safely and consistently enough to scale it.
The research also points to where Americas operators see growth. Network API monetization leads the region’s new revenue agenda, followed by B2B2X and network slicing — a signal that carriers are betting on the network itself as the platform for AI-era growth.
Join us at Innovate Americas
The findings will frame the agenda at Innovate Americas 2026 (October 6–7, Dallas, Texas), where TM Forum will bring the industry together to tackle the practical modernization work behind the race to autonomous enterprise.
Composable IT and Ecosystem sessions will focus on moving from problem statement to action plan, convening operators and ecosystem partners around the practical steps needed to simplify IT, scale AI responsibly and turn network capabilities into new sources of growth.
About the research
Reinventing IT for the AI era is a TM Forum Insights research report based on a survey of 216 IT executives from 111 operators across 72 countries. Respondents include C-suite leaders, network architects and software engineering practitioners. The Americas findings draw on 31 respondents and should be read as directional, providing an indicative view of regional CIO priorities rather than a statistically definitive benchmark.
The full global report is available: Reinventing IT for the AI era
About TM Forum
TM Forum is an alliance of over 800 organizations spanning the global connectivity ecosystem, including the world’s top ten Communication Service Providers (CSPs), top three hyperscalers and Network Equipment Providers (NEPs), vendors, consultancies and system integrators, large and small.
We provide a place for our Members to collaborate, innovate, and deliver lasting change. Together, we are building a sustainable future for the industry in connectivity and beyond.
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