“The end-to-end architecture is not a nicety. It is the solution to a vexing problem, yet almost no one is talking about it.” – Grant Lenahan

This Appledore Research note reports from TM Forum’s Innovate Americas 2026 in Allen, Texas, the Forum’s North American counterpart to DTW Ignite. Agentic AI dominated the agenda, and this year many operators came with deployment experience and hard data rather than slideware.

We distil seven takeaways: how operators are building trust in agents, why token spend has become an economic discipline, and how CSPs can use LLMs without giving away hard-won operating know-how. We also give our candid view of what the stages missed: the business case, and the end-to-end autonomous network architecture without which today’s agentic islands risk becoming tomorrow’s legacy spaghetti.

A sidebar summarises the sessions chaired by Patrick Kelly on running AI in production, covering context, workflow, cost and control.

For CSP operations and strategy teams, and for the vendors that sell to them, this is a grounded read on where agentic operations really stand, and where the gap between conference talk and engineering reality lies.

Companies mentioned in this report: 1Finity (Fujitsu), Accenture, AT&T, Bell, Ciena (Blue Planet), Cisco, Comcast, Databricks, EchoStar, Ericsson, Huawei, IBM, Interbank, Lumen, Nokia, Numodata, Ocient, Oracle, Palantir, Samsung, ServiceNow, Splunk, TELUS, TypeSafe AI, Uber and Verizon.

Grant Lenahan’s slide deck on the state of Autonomous Networks is shown below. Scroll down for the full event report.