This article was first published in The Fast Mode.
The B2B market represents a major growth opportunity for CSPs. But the B2B market is fragmented with many very different types of customer segments and verticals with different connectivity and technology requirements. Manufacturing companies, logistics firms, events organisers, ports, airports, and mining companies may all have different needs, and these will vary depending on the size of the companies, regardless of the vertical market they are in. Supplying advanced connectivity and technology solutions to diverse B2B segments will require CSPs to support and manage increasingly complex solutions. CSPs face a challenge: how to accelerate efforts to support a wider array of B2B customer types with more complex offerings to grow B2B revenues. This is where AI and automation can help. AI-driven autonomous networks, supported by an AI-driven BSS layer for sales and care operations, help CSPs to manage complexity, sell more, and provide a better customer experience when doing it.
Let’s take outdoor events as an example. How can CSPs provide B2B solutions specifically designed for outdoor event management companies that solve a real business problem these companies face?
Glastonbury is a small town in the South-West of England with a population of just over 8000. Each summer, over 200,000 people converge on the town for its famous music festival. Outdoor events are generating more crowds and revenue than ever before. The BBC reported that music festivals such as Glastonbury are worth up to £900 million to the wider West of England economy and that in 2023,19.2 million ‘music tourists’ went to live music events in the UK.
Outdoor events are big business. While 200,000 people attending Glastonbury seems huge, it is dwarfed by the 700,000 fans who attended Rock in Rio 2024. F1 also draws huge crowds, with over 465,000 fans going to the 2025 Australian F1 Grand Prix over the course of the event’s four days.
That’s a lot of people out to enjoy themselves with a lot of their hard-earned money to spend. Most of them won’t use cash to buy merchandise, drinks, and food. They’ll use phones, debit cards, and credit cards and tap EPOS (electronic point of sales) terminals to make their purchases. And the one thing that’s needed to make sure these financial transactions run smoothly is connectivity, which, for most cases, for outdoor events requires 5G and increasingly 5G SA (stand-alone). For merchants who hire space or stalls to sell their products at events, poor connectivity doesn’t just mean a bad experience; it can be a financial disaster. When an event organiser is selling retail stalls or space to a merchant, then part of the deal should be that the connectivity that’s required to enable all EPOS terminals to work as expected will be provided.
When selling stalls or spaces to merchants, event organisers can offer guaranteed connectivity to ensure the merchants’ EPOS terminals work. They can do so by partnering with their CSP to deliver 5G SA network slices that will guarantee the required speed, data throughput and latency rates.
This is already starting to happen. In 2024, Vodafone ran a trial deployment of a 5G network slice at the Glastonbury music festival. Here, Vodafone provided a cellular-enabled router that accessed the 5G SA network slice to merchants who then connected their EPOS devices to the router using Wi-Fi. T-Mobile also used the same concept at the Las Vegas F1 Grand Prix in 2023.
Looking ahead, there’s an opportunity to turn these trials into a commercial reality whereby CSPs partner with event organisers – be it F1 races or music festivals and sell 5G SA slices, guaranteeing the required levels of connectivity that merchants need. The event organisers can buy access to these slices, plus the routers, from the CSP and then sell them directly to the merchants they work with. Looking at the current industry advances that are being carried out with digital twins, autonomous networks, and AI, CSPs can start to assure the service quality that will be delivered to the merchants at outdoor events. To ensure that the CSPs can deliver the speed, latency, and throughput on the slices, they can model the performance using a digital twin of the network. This digital twin mirrors the physical network in a virtualised lab environment to enable ‘what if’ simulations and see the impact of any network changes.
To give an example, let’s say that the CSP wants to sell 100 music festival merchant offers (comprising the router, guaranteed connectivity of 100 Mbps for up to 10 EPOS devices and an SLA) to an event organiser. To know that this will work and that the merchants will get the service assurance they need, the sales agent in the CSP can use the SFA tool in the BSS to automatically request a feasibility simulation in the digital twin. In this case, the automated request would pass from the BSS to the Digital Operations Centre. This provides end-to-end service management, including service orchestration, assurance capabilities and unified inventory, which enables the use of network digital twins and knowledge graphs for closed-loop automation. The Digital Operations Centre would perform feasibility checks against future traffic forecasts and simulate the new service impact against the digital twin, which would run the simulation and provide the service forecasting. This way, the Digital Operations Centre ensures that the 5G service will function in the right location and time, allowing the right load.
The result of this simulation is passed to the AI copilot that supports B2B SFA (sales force automation). This AI sales copilot can provide the sales agents with suggested actions based on the output from the simulation in the digital twin. The sales agent can act on the AI suggestions (assuming the output is positive, and the service can be supported) and activate the services and offers for the event organiser, knowing that the offer will deliver the correct user experience and can meet any SLAs that are part of the offer. This process, to support this B2B sales example, is illustrated in Figure 1.
Figure 1: End-to-End B2B Sales Use Case
Once the offer has been sold and the merchant is using the service, the CSP can collect data from an autonomous network to monitor service assurance. This data is combined with agentic AI data from the digital twin based on the service simulation. This is then automatically passed back to the Digital Operations Centre and then to B2B SFA with the recommendations of AI agents about any required follow-up actions or upsells that the sales agents need to do. This closed-loop assurance process using an autonomous network and the digital twin is illustrated in Figure 2.
Figure 2: Closed-Loop Assurance using AI/GenAI and a Digital Twin
Using the AI copilot in the BSS, the sales agent could issue an assurance report that the event organiser can view in their care app, which lets them see that the service worked as promised. Ensuring service quality for merchants at outdoor events is just one example. At the same event CSPs could partner with the event organisers to sell access to slices that would assure high-speed uploading of videos by customers at the event.
The introduction of autonomous networks, whereby the network automatically scales up and down and configures, heals, and optimises itself in real-time, will provide better support for events that drive a huge spike in network usage. Autonomous networks do this by anticipating needs and self-configuring for optimal performance. The networks leverage AI learning and Large Language Models to self-manage. They can predict failures and performance enhancements before they happen and test configurations and actions against the digital twin before they are rolled out to the network. This way the success rate of the network changes increases dramatically and performance to ensure connectivity continues to be delivered autonomously The sheer scale of large outdoor events like F1 races and music festivals will no doubt always require additional, temporary base stations and having these running as part of an autonomous network will deliver the right network experience to right customers at the right time and open new revenues for CSPs.
Qvantel and Nokia, plus other partners including e&, Deutsche Telekom, Telstra, Telin, STC, Microsoft, Infosys and Red Hat, will be showcasing a solution that supports the selling, delivering, and assuring 5G SA slices for merchants (and others) at events. This is just one use case that their TM Forum Moonshot Catalyst, Evolving to Full Network Autonomy supports.
Martin Morgan, Head of Digital Marketing, Qvantel
Elana Crowne, Director of Product Marketing, Nokia