By Genie Yuan, Regional Vice President, APAC Japan, Couchbase
In the Philippines, life happens on mobile. Smartphones have become an essential part of everyday life in the country, enabling people to connect, enjoy entertainment, and shop online. By early 2025, the country tallied 142 million active mobile connections and over 97 million internet users, highlighting its position as a mobile-first economy.
This mobile penetration underpins a booming digital economy, with e-commerce hitting USD $28 billion in 2024 and increasing to USD $40.5 billion by 2027. Fuelling this growth are telecommunications companies (telcos), which have transformed from simple voice and data providers to vital enablers of trade, content, and everyday connectivity.
While this steady and rapid growth in mobile connectivity and digital engagement is impressive, it also means the country must grapple with lagging infrastructure that will struggle to keep up with more and more mobile connections set to run on 5G.
The opportunity for growth
As lifestyles become increasingly digital, telecommunication companies (telcos) must modernize to meet new expectations for real-time, personalized, and seamless customer experiences. Telcos are now delivering entertainment, commerce, and interconnected digital experiences through mobile devices. Customers want and expect interactions to be tailored to their preferences, whether they're troubleshooting a device or exploring new plan options. But what happens when cellular connections generate more data than the infrastructure can handle?
By now, it's clear that legacy systems lack the bandwidth to handle real-time personalization and network optimization based on live data and predictive insights. Telcos still operate with siloed data and rigid architectures that lack the agility to scale services. These limitations of legacy systems lead to prolonged downtimes and disruptions. Bridging this gap requires more than incremental upgrades; it calls for a new data and intelligence layer capable of turning raw network activity into actionable insights at speed and scale. This is where artificial intelligence (AI) becomes a decisive growth driver.
How AI can be a growth driver for success
With a unified, agile data foundation, AI promises game-changing benefits in telecommunications -- personalized customer engagement, predictive maintenance, and smarter capital allocation. According to McKinsey, telcos will be able to better understand individual customers' network experience thanks to advancements in AI, enabling capital allocation that maximizes return on investment (ROI), provides higher reliability, and better commercial outcomes.
However, the caveat is that you need a future-proof data foundation that's built for AI. Adding AI tools to old, disjointed systems without any foundational change can lead to inefficiencies and unsatisfactory results -- precisely the issues that AI aims to address. While the Philippines is increasing investments and projects in AI to PHP 2.6 billion (USD 45.48 billion) by 2028, the necessary infrastructure to enable secure, real-time, and scalable implementations is not quite there yet.
This raises key questions for telcos:
Answering "no" to any of these points highlights a critical shortcoming of existing systems in meeting the demands of an always-on, data-intensive market. Closing that gap requires technology that not only interprets information but also acts on it autonomously, making decisions, optimising operations, and adapting in real time.
Through the power of a next-generation data foundation, telcos can harness the power of agentic AI to do all of the above, driving the next phase of technological evolution and market growth. Agentic AI has the capacity to move beyond the creative output of generative AI. By pairing agentic AI with a robust data architecture, telcos will be primed to embed intelligence directly into business operations to generate measurable, sustained value. In practical terms, this could look like assessing real-time network information, anticipating possible problems, and autonomously distributing resources to handle traffic increases.
By implementing an agentic AI-prepared platform, telcos can also consolidate technology stacks, anticipate customer requirements, and expedite data-informed decision-making. This proactive approach reduces service interruptions and upholds customer satisfaction, which is a crucial focus for a sector where providing reliable service directly affects brand image.
Winning requires a strong foundation
The Philippine telecommunications industry is being disrupted by AI and the torrential wave of data it brings. The next wave of digital growth will be won by telcos who invest in their foundations instead of just deploying AI tools without understanding the context in which they operate.
Philippine telcos must do more than just expand network capacity if they are to thrive in a telecommunications landscape that is ever evolving. Those who can use AI to predict customer needs, enhance workflows, and innovate widely will come out on top. A robust, cohesive data framework that promotes accuracy, speed, and flexibility throughout the company will be necessary for this. By taking this approach, telcos can establish themselves as leaders that are innovating for the digital future of the Philippines.
The choice is clear: adapt now or be left behind. Telcos that build a strong data foundation will position themselves to thrive with AI and shape the digital future of the Philippines. Acting now positions organisation to lead, not follow, in the next phase of growth.