As connectivity becomes increasingly commoditized and digital services multiply across categories, the industry is rethinking where its long-term value lies. Operators are steadily evolving into digital service providers, monetization engines and strategic enablers for entire partner ecosystems. This transition has been unfolding for years, but several forces will accelerate it in the year ahead: the rise of agentic AI, the rapid expansion of B2B and B2B2C models, and a shift in streaming economics toward engagement rather than subscriber growth.
1. Agentic AI becomes the industry’s operating layer
In 2026, AI stops being a forward-looking concept and becomes the operational backbone of how digital services are launched, managed, and monetized.
Agentic AI will take the lead in areas that have long bottlenecked the operator ecosystem. As telcos increasingly position themselves as digital lifestyle providers rather than pure connectivity players, partnerships have become central to how value is created and delivered. Partner onboarding is one of the most transformative areas for change. Today’s onboarding workflows involve complex coordination between product, engineering, finance, and compliance teams. Agentic systems will increasingly automate these steps end-to-end – validating entitlements, aligning catalogues, generating commercial structures, configuring offers, and pressure-testing entire customer journeys. This level of automation allows operators to expand their partner ecosystems much faster, localize offers more intelligently, and respond to market shifts in near real time.
The same evolution will reshape the subscriber lifecycle. AI is already moving beyond churn prediction and into active lifecycle management. In live environments, it is being used to identify the most effective retention pathways, recover payments before failures occur, personalize onboarding journeys, intervene when engagement patterns shift, and surface relevant content or services at moments when interest is highest. AI’s impact on churn prevention is particularly crucial as it remains a persistent structural challenge for streaming and digital services. Parks Associates’ recent research shows that churn remains high across OTT services, more than 30% annually in the U.S., even as rotation behavior stabilizes and ad-supported tiers are adopted at record levels. This volatility exposes the limits of manual processes and reinforces the need for AI systems that can not only interpret behavior but also act on it.
2. B2B and B2B2C become essential growth engines
The second major trend shaping 2026 is the expansion of B2B opportunities as a core growth engine for operators. With consumer subscription behavior stabilizing and household spending evening out, operators are increasingly turning toward enterprise partners that need the infrastructure to run subscription-based digital services. Industries such as media, sports, retail, automotive and healthcare are all moving toward recurring-revenue models, yet many lack the identity, billing and lifecycle management capabilities required to operate them at scale. Telcos are well positioned to fill that gap, providing the existing billing relationships and deep operational backbone these partners cannot easily build themselves.
A particularly important development is the shift in MVNO dynamics. MVNOs are moving beyond simple resale of connectivity. Many now want to offer full digital service portfolios – entertainment bundles, lifestyle apps, cloud storage, gaming and other category-specific products – but they require telco-grade infrastructure to do so. This creates a multiplier effect for operators: instead of monetizing only their own subscriber base, they have the opportunity to monetize through every MVNO they support, extending reach across new customer segments with far lower acquisition cost.
This evolution also mirrors the wider industry transition toward unified digital storefronts where operators aggregate third-party services, manage entitlements and orchestrate bundles through a single platform. It sounds simple, but powering this type of all-in-one marketplace requires specialist partner collaboration – and purpose-built ecosystems. That’s exactly why we recently partnered with Tata Elxsi to introduce our Subscription Hub concept, with early trials demonstrating significant time to market reductions and faster bundling across pay TV, broadband and OTT products. These capabilities are becoming essential as operators expand their partner ecosystems and look to manage an increasingly diverse mix of digital services at scale.
3. Engagement becomes the center of streaming and telco economics
The final defining trend for 2026 is the economic pivot from pure acquisition and subscriber growth to sustained engagement. Netflix has led the market by moving beyond reporting subscriber numbers and focusing on metrics like viewing time. Consumers expect more fluidity and flexibility than ever. They activate services to watch specific events, cancel when they are finished and return months later. Acquisition alone cannot sustain margins in this environment; the economic engine must shift to engagement and lifetime value.
These dynamics are transforming how pricing and packaging evolve. Flexible, moment-driven access (from highlights tiers to day passes and short-term upgrades) is becoming a central part of the value equation. Many sports viewers subscribe to a streaming service solely to access a sporting event, and they often stay subscribed after the game or season, illustrating how event-driven behavior shapes retention. Operators that invest in streaming partnerships (particularly sports-centric services) and support access models around these micro-moments will be well positioned to capture incremental value and fan loyalty.
Bundling will also continue its evolution. Entertainment is more fragmented than ever and consumers gravitate toward simplicity. Telcos are uniquely positioned to offer that simplicity – Parks Associates’ same data reinforced this position, showing that the most common streaming bundles today are anchored around broadband subscriptions. Smart bundles that adapt to viewing behavior, price sensitivity and household needs will drive deeper loyalty, especially as content rights splinter across platforms. The economics of engagement will be further strengthened by AI-driven lifecycle optimization. When operators can detect behavioral drift early, intervene proactively and personalize retention pathways, they can create more predictable revenue patterns and a more intuitive subscriber experience.
A new operating model for the digital services economy
Across all these trends, one narrative is clear: operators need to embrace their role as orchestrators of digital revenue ecosystems. Agentic AI will power the operational layer, new models will expand what monetization can look like, and engagement will determine long-term value.
Operators that can bring partners to market faster, open new routes to distribution, and act on subscriber signals as they emerge will set the pace for the industry. A telco monetization reset is happening, redefining the strategies and technologies behind revenue and retention. Now, it’s just a question of who will be first off the new starting blocks.
