Amol Phadke | Tech Mahindra

Author Profile

Amol Phadke

Chief Transformation Officer, Tech Mahindra

Amolphadke

Amol is the Chief Transformation Officer at Tech Mahindra, with a mandate covering enterprise-wide transformation strategy, with a particular focus on the communications industry vertical. His background spans three distinct vantage points on the telecom and AI infrastructure question: as a network architect and operator (BT, Alcatel-Lucent, Accenture, where he led global network services across the US, India, Singapore, and the UK), as a hyperscaler working with carriers at scale (Google Cloud, where he led the global communications service provider vertical), and as a carrier CTO responsible for deploying AI infrastructure in practice (Telenor). That combination of perspectives shapes how he approaches questions about where value is created and captured in an AI-native network architecture. At Telenor, where he served as Group CTO and EVP from 2023 to 2024, he led the operator's AI-first strategy and was directly involved in establishing one of the first sovereign AI factories launched by a European carrier, built in partnership with AWS and Nvidia. 

At Tech Mahindra he has continued to work on the practical side of agentic AI in telecom, including the Large Telco Model developed with Nvidia and deployed with O2 Telefónica in Germany, and a recent collaboration with Microsoft on an ontology-driven agentic platform for network operations. He has been a regular speaker at MWC Barcelona, Nvidia GTC, DSP Leaders Forum, and TM Forum events, and contributes to the Nvidia developer blog on agentic AI in telecom. Amol sits on the TM Forum Board of Directors and its Autonomous Networks Mission Board.

Insights

Views

For those of us who have served the industry for the last few decades, the challenges presented by artificial intelligence might remind us a lot of the broadband wars of 20 years ago, when telecommunications companies invested billions making it possible for customers to download more data at home and on the road yet somehow ended up no more profitable than before they began. Today telcos are still collecting their standard broadband rental every month even as over-the-top services take a disproportionately large share of overall revenue.

Views

In the last three decades, every major enterprise technology wave has followed a simple pattern: it came with a beginning and an end. When enterprise resource planning (ERP) arrived, it had go-live dates. When we migrated to the cloud, we celebrated the completion of the "lift and shift." With digital transformation, it always came with a program charter and an eventual closing report. In short, the change was episodic.

Podcast

Featuring Amol Phadke, Chief Transformation Officer at Tech Mahindra, in conversation with Dr. Rainer Deutschmann, Group Chief Strategy and Transformation Officer at Axiata Group on what it really means to be sovereign in AI.

Views

I remember, a few years ago, as an industry we were super excited about 5G monetization, the benefits it would bring for customers, and the revenue uplift that it would create for equipment vendors and telecom service providers. You already know how that story unfolded. In most markets, the promised improvement of ARPU did not show up as expected. But, on the brighter side, we learnt an important albeit expensive lesson about who should set the agenda for a major transformation like this one.