BATIC 2025 Day One: Telecom’s Next Leaders Confront Industry Future
The Future Tech Leaders Summit made its debut at BATIC 2025 and the forum connected under-30 industry talent with global telecom leaders to discuss technology, debate survival, and the future of the industry.
The event, co-organized with the ITW Global Leaders’ Forum (GLF), saw senior leaders from Telin, Dialog Axiata, e&, and other carriers join young professionals to debate and stress-test four starkly different futures for a telecom industry facing shrinking margins, hyperscaler power, and geopolitical risk.
Four Futures
Sam Evans, Senior Managing Director at FTI Delta, set the stage by outlining the four scenarios. “This isn’t prediction,” he cautioned. “It’s preparation for futures already unfolding.”
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In the pessimistic case, telcos retreat inward: cutting costs, automating service, and focusing on survival.
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The optimistic version sees operators collaborating with hyperscalers, using AI to deliver services faster and more efficiently.
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The ecosystem model empowers customer-facing control to platform giants, while carriers maintain the underlying infrastructure.
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In Nirvana, operators become globally ambitious, investing in next-generation networks to ensure diverse connectivity and deliver seamless international reach.
Each model carried trade-offs. Cost discipline clashed with innovation. Control wrestled with collaboration. Scale demanded risk. Evans pressed participants to view the scenarios not as hypotheticals, but as realities already taking shape.
Preparing New Leaders
If strategy was one half of the conversation, leadership was the other.
Kharisma, Chief Commercial Officer at Telin, argued that preparing future leaders requires pairing ambition with discipline. In his view, tomorrow’s telecom leaders must learn to take risks without losing sight of operational and financial guardrails. “The next generation should be bold, but grounded in operational reality,” he noted.
Nabil Baccouche, Group Chief Carrier & Wholesale Officer at e&, stressed adaptability. “The industry is reshaping around ecosystems. Resilience and agility will define who thrives,” he said.
Telecom’s future, he said, will be forged at the intersection of infrastructure and platforms, telcos and hyperscalers. Success depends on resilience and the ability to pivot as alliances and business models shift.
Both agreed: the command-and-control style that once defined telecom leadership is giving way to collaboration and trust.
Lessons in Crisis
The clearest case study came from Lim Li San, Group COO at Dialog Axiata. She described how the Sri Lanka operator navigated 2022’s economic freefall, marked by 88% inflation, a doubling of exchange rates, and tripled fuel prices.
Rather than contract, Dialog grew its mobile market share from 4% to 68%, expanded fixed broadband to 55%, and claimed 70% of the pay-TV market. Revenue rose 21%; EBITDA surged 45%.
The turnaround, she said, came from cost reduction, restructuring, and consolidation, as well as maintaining stakeholder trust amid volatility. Her point was blunt: “Resilience isn’t a buzzword. It is what separates collapse from reinvention.
From Hypothesis to Action
To close the summit, younger professionals were asked to present their own solutions to the four scenarios. Their proposals ranged from AI-enabled delivery models to cross-border infrastructure alliances and new sustainability frameworks.
Evans, who moderated proceedings, called the exercise the essence of the summit. “Preparing the next generation isn’t about forecasts. It’s about equipping leaders to act in real time,” he said.
Why It Matters
Telecom is more than another industry; it is the infrastructure of the digital economy. Finance, healthcare, logistics, and entertainment, all depend on its stability. Yet the sector faces tightening margins, political risks, and the gravitational pull of hyperscalers.
The Future Tech Leaders Summit at BATIC 2025 laid out the stakes. The industry faces a fork in the road: retreat into a utility status, cede the frontline to hyperscalers, or reinvent itself as a global, borderless enabler of digital life.
What happens next will be decided not just by today’s executives, but by the young leaders they are training to take their place.