From connectivity provider to growth partner

How telcos can unlock potential with small and medium-sized enterprises

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are digitising rapidly, but telcos seize only a fraction of the opportunity due to gaps between SME expectations and current offerings. To unlock growth, telcos must simplify integration, make reliability visible, and shift from offering security tools to managed protection, delivering integrated, outcome-oriented solutions.

This report, co-authored with the IBM Institute for Business Value, explores the following:

What prevents SME trust from becoming digital adoption?

While SMEs trust their telcos, adoption stalls because telcos often misread their priorities, overemphasising cost sensitivity and underestimating concerns about operational risk and disruption. SMEs say they would pay up to 34% more for turnkey, outcome-based digital bundles, signalling that simplification, not additional products, is the real adoption driver.

How can telcos turn reliability into a premium offering?

SMEs want reliability they can measure. Nearly half say current service-level agreements lack return on investment (RoI) visibility, and 83% say AI-enabled assurance would increase adoption. Real-time dashboards, proactive insights, and business impact translation shift reliability from a contractual promise to a monetisable, outcome-driven service that strengthens trust and differentiates telco offerings.

Why are SMEs shifting towards managed security outcomes?

With 82% experiencing a cyberattack in the past year, SMEs want integrated, continuously operated protection with clear RoI. While they currently turn to IT and cloud providers nearly twice as often as telcos, SMEs are willing to pay 30% more for AI-enabled, managed security bundles from their telcos, underscoring demand for accountability, visibility and risk reduction delivered as an outcome.