Note: This is the second of a two-part series exploring the rise of autonomous businesses driven by agentic AI systems. In Part 1, I focused on how enterprises are adopting these systems to revolutionize operations and decision-making. Part 2 delves into how telcos and telecom-adjacent companies must evolve to support this transformation, building the infrastructure for agent-to-agent communication.
Part 2: Telcos Must Build the Infrastructure to Support Agentic AI, But They Don’t Know How to Do It.
The Evolution of Telecom: Supporting Enterprise Innovation
In Part 1, we explored how enterprises are rapidly adopting agentic AI systems to move toward autonomous business models.
This shift broadly parallels the historical evolution of telecom:
• Telcos first connected individual people and then people within enterprises (e.g., PBX systems).
• They then expanded to enable global communication between enterprises.
• Now, telcos must evolve again to support agent-to-agent communication in the age of AI.
Here’s the challenge: communication outside the enterprise is much more complex. When AI enters the picture and the data workloads increase, it becomes an obstacle for organizations that are anything less than agentic in nature to function. Such an agentic AI future for enterprises requires identity, trust, authentication, and authorization to operate at scale and autonomously—capabilities that telcos are uniquely positioned to deliver by virtue of their heritage as regulated entities and continual investment in developing nascent technologies. At the same time, the world of decentralized, autonomous services such as those that support agentic AI systems historically is not a known operating environment for them.
The OSI Model and the Future of Telco Networks
Just as the OSI model created a framework for traditional telecommunications networking, it can guide telcos in building the next-gen infrastructure for agentic AI:
The OSI model is a seven-layer conceptual model for framing how various disparate hardware and software systems that comprise a telecom network must work together to send data over a network, owing to various technical, geographical and political boundaries.
• Layers 1, 2 and 3 of the OSI model address physical, data link and network layers respectively.
• Layer 4 (Transport): Here, telcos must ensure low-latency, high-bandwidth connectivity across BLE, WiFi, and cellular networks.
• Layer 5 (Session): Persistent, secure agent sessions must be supported to enable cross-enterprise collaboration.
• Layer 6 (Presentation): Protocols are needed to ensure seamless communication between diverse AI systems.
• Layer 7 (Application): App-level solutions are required in order to allow agents to discover, connect, and collaborate.
The Role of Telcos in Agent-to-Agent Communication
To enable secure, reliable, and scalable agent-to-agent communication, telcos must address several key challenges:
1. Transporting All of That Data:
Telcos need to enable enterprise-level support for petabytes of data flowing into and out of corporations every moment of every day. To accomplish this, telecoms must provide a secure execution environment for AI agents in the transport of their date. The AgentVM by Synergetics (Layer 4) enables data to traverse networks securely and efficiently by supporting AI-native cloud and edge processing across telco infrastructures.
2. Authentication and Authorization:
Telcos must provide infrastructure that enables agents to authenticate each other and exchange data securely. This aligns with the Session (Layer 5) and Presentation (Layer 6) functions of the OSI model.
3. Enabling Seamless Communication:
For agents that traverse networks, Telcos can leverage AgentFlow (Layer 5 and Layer 6) — a patented protocol for inter-agent communication. It ensures real-time, asynchronous interactions across enterprise boundaries.
4. Establishing Identity and Trust:
AI agents operating across enterprises need verified identities to ensure secure interactions. This is where tools like AgentRegistry from Synergetics comes in (Layer 7), enabling zero-knowledge proof identity verification and Know Your Agent (KYA) compliance.
5. Powering Transactions and Digital Commerce:
Telcos must support agent-driven transactions with solutions like AgentWallet (Layer 7), which handles digital assets, identity, and currency for autonomous agents.
Telcos at a Crossroads
The future of telecom isn’t just about connecting people—it’s about enabling autonomous AI ecosystems that will drive success for their enterprise customers. Telcos must:
· Invest in AI-native infrastructure to meet the needs of enterprise AI.
· Adopt decentralized, autonomous tools to integrate AI-driven identity, trust, and communication.
· Build the next-gen OSI stack that supports agentic AI at scale.
The next wave of telecom innovation isn’t just AI-powered. It’s AI-native. The question is: Are telcos ready to lead?
