Tech Mahindra wins TM Forum award for AI assurance
Wed, 5th Aug 2026 (Today)
Tech Mahindra has won a TM Forum DTW Ignite 2026 Catalyst award for its AI-powered Business-Aware Assurance solution. The award was presented in the Best Moonshot Catalyst - Showcase & Storyline Excellence category.
The software was developed as part of a TM Forum Catalyst initiative to help communications service providers identify, rank and fix service problems based on customer and business impact rather than network events alone.
TM Forum Catalyst projects are judged by a panel of telecommunications industry experts on criteria including innovation, business impact, proof of concept and scalability. Here, the recognition focused on a system designed to improve service assurance as network environments grow more complex.
According to Tech Mahindra, the framework is intended to support the shift toward Level 4 autonomous network operations. It demonstrated more than 90 per cent end-to-end automation across several network operating scenarios, reducing the need for manual intervention.
As lead systems integrator and solution orchestrator for the initiative, Tech Mahindra combined agentic AI, graph intelligence, digital twins, telecom domain knowledge, data engineering and TM Forum Open APIs. The resulting assurance framework was built for 5G, cloud-native, edge and multi-domain networks.
The system uses Google's GraphFlow-based Graph Neural Networks on a digital twin built with Google Spanner Graph. This enables operators to correlate events across radio access, core and cloud environments for fault detection, root cause analysis and business impact assessment.
It was also built on a set of TM Forum Open APIs, including TMF642, TMF628, TMF702, TMF921 and TMF915. Tech Mahindra said this approach is intended to support interoperability across multi-vendor environments and reduce dependence on proprietary infrastructure.
Operational focus
The product addresses a longstanding issue in telecoms operations, where assurance systems often focus mainly on infrastructure alarms. Tech Mahindra said its framework instead links network events to services, customers, revenue streams and operational priorities, helping operators decide which issues to address first.
This business-led approach is designed to improve service restoration times and reduce the burden of handling large volumes of alarms. It can also help cut mean time to resolution and lower the operational cost of managing modern network environments, according to the company.
Manish Mangal outlined the operational problem the company is trying to solve.
"As telecom operators modernize increasingly complex network environments, the industry is steadily progressing toward more autonomous operations. A key challenge is identifying and resolving customer service degradations across multiple network domains while understanding their impact on customers and business outcomes. This recognition from TM Forum reflects our focus on applying AI, graph intelligence, digital twins, and automation to help operators address these challenges, improve operational efficiency and enhance customer experience," said Manish Mangal, President and Head of Americas Communications Business at Tech Mahindra.
Google Cloud worked with Tech Mahindra on the initiative. According to the companies, the cloud provider contributed AI tools, graph database technology and expertise drawn from operating its own large-scale network infrastructure.
The collaboration reflects a broader pattern in telecoms, with service providers combining network data, commercial data and automation software to manage increasingly distributed systems. As operators roll out 5G, cloud-native cores and edge architectures, assurance tools are moving beyond traditional fault monitoring toward systems that can weigh commercial impact.
Jen Hawes-Hewitt described the rationale for that approach.
"This collaboration with Tech Mahindra delivers a powerful combination of agentic AI capabilities and deep telecom expertise. By unifying network and commercial insights, this solution places customers at the heart of Autonomous Networks reasoning, helping operators conquer cross-domain complexity, uncover hidden inefficiencies, and accelerate business value from their transition to truly autonomous operations," said Jen Hawes-Hewitt.
Tech Mahindra employs more than 146,000 people across 90 countries and provides consulting, information technology, engineering, network and business process services. The company is part of the Mahindra Group.
The award places Tech Mahindra's telecoms work within TM Forum's industry programme for testing ideas around automation, interoperability and network operations. The recognised project focuses on linking assurance decisions to customer and business impact rather than alarm volume alone.