The AI Divide: Why Telcos and Tech Bet on Different Digital Futures

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – December 03, 2025 – In our hyper-connected world, the cost of digital silence is measured in millions of dollars per hour. As businesses grapple with the ever-present threat of system outages, two of the economy's most vital sectors—telecommunications and technology—are racing to find a solution. A revealing new report from intelligent observability firm New Relic, however, shows they are not running the same race. While both industries are betting their futures on observability—the ability to deeply understand a system's health in real-time—they are taking dramatically different paths to get there, exposing a fundamental divide in strategy driven by risk, regulation, and the transformative power of artificial intelligence.

The Multi-Million Dollar Glitch

The financial stakes of IT downtime have become staggering. According to the New Relic 'State of Observability' report, which surveyed over 400 professionals in the field, high-impact outages are a disturbingly frequent event. A remarkable 57% of telecommunications companies (telcos) report experiencing these critical failures at least weekly, a figure that dwarfs the already concerning 27% reported by technology companies.

The cost of this instability is immense. For a technology firm, an hour of downtime averages a painful $1.6 million in lost revenue and operational costs. For a telco, that figure climbs to an average of $2 million per hour. These numbers, while shocking, align with broader industry data showing that for many large enterprises, the cost of a single hour of IT failure can easily run into the seven figures. The fallout extends beyond the balance sheet, eroding customer trust, damaging brand reputation, and causing widespread operational chaos for the countless businesses that depend on these services.

Two Paths to Resilience

Faced with this shared threat, the two industries have diverged onto unique strategic paths. The technology sector, home to the very concept of DevOps, is taking a methodical, bottom-up approach. These organizations are building on a strong, developer-centric foundation. The report finds high adoption rates for foundational practices, with 71% deploying alerts and network monitoring and 69% using Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines. They are shoring up the fundamentals—infrastructure monitoring, Application Performance Monitoring (APM), and distributed tracing—before making a full-scale leap to more advanced systems.

In stark contrast, the telecommunications industry is leapfrogging. Feeling the intense pressure of their high outage costs, telcos are jumping directly to an AI-first strategy. An astonishing 74% of telcos have already adopted AI monitoring capabilities, a rate that significantly outpaces the global average of 54% across all industries. This aggressive adoption reflects a high-stakes bet that AI-powered automation and predictive analytics can deliver immediate, transformative results.

"This data is powerful because it shows more than one path to observability maturity," noted New Relic Chief Technology Strategist Nic Benders in the report's release. "For telcos, they face extreme pressure from high outage costs and are successfully leapfrogging traditional monitoring to go AI-first, while IT organizations are leveraging their strengths by building a developer-centric foundation."

Despite their different starting points, both roads lead toward automation. AI is the top strategic driver for adopting observability in both sectors, and while less than half of tech companies currently use AI monitoring, a massive 94% plan to implement it within the next three years, signaling a future convergence.

Public Safety vs. Profit: The AI Imperative for Telcos

To understand the telco industry's urgent, AI-first approach, one must look beyond profit and loss. For a technology company, an outage is a severe business problem. For a telecommunications provider, it can be a public safety crisis. As designated critical national infrastructure, telco networks are the lifeline for emergency services. An outage that prevents a 911 call is not just an SLA breach; it's a failure with potentially life-or-death consequences, attracting the immediate attention of regulatory bodies like the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

This unique position places immense pressure on telcos to guarantee near-perfect uptime. The risk is not merely financial but regulatory and societal. This context explains their willingness to bypass incremental steps and invest heavily in AI-powered observability. AIOps (AI for IT Operations) offers the promise of moving from reactive to predictive problem-solving. By analyzing vast streams of network data in real-time, AI algorithms can detect subtle anomalies and forecast potential failures before they cascade into full-blown outages, allowing engineers to intervene proactively. For an industry where every second of downtime counts, this predictive capability is not a luxury; it's an essential tool for risk management and fulfilling their public duty.

The Tangible Returns of Seeing Everything

Whether methodical or a great leap forward, the investment in observability is paying substantial dividends. The report highlights a strong return on investment (ROI) across both sectors. Nearly half (49%) of tech organizations and 58% of telcos report a return of 2-3x or more on their observability spend. More impressively, a significant 10% of telco respondents are seeing returns between 5x and 10x, a testament to the value unlocked by their aggressive AI strategy.

These returns manifest as distinct business benefits. For the efficiency-focused tech industry, the top cited benefits are improved operational efficiency (43%) and enhanced system uptime and reliability (40%). For telcos, the priorities are clear: improved system uptime (38%) is paramount, followed by a boost in developer productivity (32%), as engineers are freed from constant firefighting.

The journey doesn't end with purchasing a platform. To maximize value, organizations are focusing on people and process. Nearly half of technology firms (49%) and 42% of telcos plan to train staff to better utilize these complex systems. Furthermore, many are looking to simplify their toolchains, with 47% of tech companies and 37% of telcos planning to consolidate their various monitoring tools into a more unified platform, reducing complexity and alert fatigue.

The divergent strategies of the technology and telecommunications industries reveal a crucial insight: the path to digital resilience is not one-size-fits-all. It is shaped by an organization's unique risk profile, market pressures, and regulatory landscape. What is clear, however, is that observability, increasingly strengthened by artificial intelligence, has transcended its origins as a technical tool. It is now a core business strategy, essential for navigating the immense complexity of the modern digital world and ensuring that when the connection matters most, it remains unbroken.