At the Operations Transformation Forum Africa 2025 (OTF Africa 2025) during AfricaCom, Safaricom Digital Service 2.0 was jointly launched with Huawei. It’s a single, intelligent interface unifying telecoms, financial, lifestyle and entertainment services. The Forum culminated in the joint unveiling of the Digital Intelligent Africa vision to accelerate continental transformation. The forum also spotlighted Huawei Cloud Stack 8.6 in sub-Saharan Africa, bringing Cloud + Data + AI capabilities to carriers that want public cloud functionality inside their own data centres.
The forum, themed: “All Intelligent Operations Ignite New Growth” convened leading operators, partners, industry bodies and technical experts to explore how intelligent operations can drive sustainable innovation and unlock new revenue.
Framing the opportunity, Austin You, President of Huawei Carrier Delivery & Service, said that Africa is poised for a step change as intelligence scales across networks and services. “This continent has the youngest population, fast urbanisation and industries digitising at speed. The next decade is a golden era for African operators as AI drives five paradigm upgrades, how networks run, how decisions are made, how services are created, how ecosystems collaborate and how value is shared,” he said. He highlighted five near-term innovation scenarios, inclusive digital finance, cloud-enabled education, connected healthcare, precision agriculture and SME digitisation, where operators can convert connectivity into everyday value. “Fibre-first infrastructure, cloud data foundations and AI-native operations will let operators move beyond connectivity to platforms that power finance, education, health, agriculture and small business growth.”
Industry leaders mapped the move to AI native telco operations, with TM Forum outlining the blueprint. George Glass, TM Forum’s Chief Technology Officer, stressed Open APIs, Open Digital Architecture (ODA) and procurement compliance as foundations for AI-native telcos, positioning Autonomous Networks as the operating model to boost resilience, agility and efficiency. He cited China Mobile’s end-to-end “Dark NOC” alongside African deployments at MTN and Safaricom that are already delivering measurable business value. “We’re moving from digital to AI native – embedding AI into customer journeys, operations and network assurance,” he said.
Operator perspectives showed how strategy converts to delivery. “We’ve evolved from selling products to orchestrating platforms and experiences, moving from information to insights to intelligence,” said Simo Mkhize, Chief Commercial Officer at Telkom Consumer South Africa, outlining how a segment-led platform economics approach is lifting digital marketing efficiency, sharpening capital allocation and improving investment returns.
Safaricom Group CTIO James Maitai described how M-PESA has become national digital infrastructure and previewed Digital Service 2.0 with Huawei, a single intelligent interface unifying telecoms, financial, lifestyle and entertainment services. “Success tomorrow means one app for everything, new experiences, diverse services and rich content ecosystems,” said Maitai, adding that a recent platform upgrade achieved zero minutes of downtime, notable in an economy where close to 60% of Kenya’s GDP flows through M-PESA.
On operations modernisation, Lucas Lu, President of Huawei’s ICT Assurance & Operation Services Domain, highlighted the shift from efficiency-oriented to effectiveness-oriented operations as networks become intelligent. He showcased African deployments of AI-powered A+P (Active+Passive) converged operations that improve network availability and service quality and pointed to agentic AI delivering end-to-end closed-loop automation for anomaly detection and root cause analysis – cutting resolution times and reducing manual intervention.
Detailing the product launch, Taylor Wu, President of Huawei HCS Solution Sales, said Cloud Stack 8.6 – focused on Cloud + Data + AI – introduces seven core capabilities to lift internal efficiency and open new digital-service revenue streams. He described Huawei Cloud Stack as public cloud capability in the customer’s data centre, allowing carriers to capture new opportunities without public cloud risk.
Independent market insight came from GlobalData. Presenting the firm’s white paper, Dustin Kehoe, APAC & MEA Region Services Director, noted that carriers in SSA are prioritising data security and legal compliance, user-experience improvements and revenue diversification, in one of the world’s most price-sensitive markets with high customer churn. In its carrier-grade hybrid cloud assessment, GlobalData ranked Huawei Cloud as the top provider in SSA, with Microsoft in second as a leader, AWS and Google recognised as dominant players, and VMware and Oracle as challengers.
The forum closed with a joint unveiling of the Digital Intelligent Africa vision, a cross-industry commitment to accelerate transformation across five pillars: infrastructure upgrades, O&M modernisation, customer experience enhancement, business model evolution and technology advancement, aimed at building a more connected, intelligent and inclusive Africa.
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