At DTW IGNITE 2026 in Copenhagen, Denmark, telco leaders emphasized that automation and autonomy are not the same thing. Anders Vestergren of Ericsson compared the difference to an automatic gearbox versus a fully self-driving car, noting that achieving autonomy depends on the use case, with Level 4 being "reasonably easy" for some cases like energy management but "very difficult" for others. T-Mobile Chief Network Officer Ankur Kapoor said he is focused on using autonomy to achieve specific customer outcomes rather than full domain-level autonomy, creating autonomous processes horizontally to improve end-to-end service experience. AWS VP and telco chief Jan Hofmeyr stated that "there’s a lot of work to be done to get the network to a point where just the basics around software deployments can be done."