Telcos are driving mission-critical innovation and cost savings through automation by leveraging AI and machine learning capabilities to improve operational efficiency, reduce costs, and enhance customer experiences. Automation is vital in the telco modernization journey, with 73% of respondents in a recent survey agreeing that operational efficiency and cost reduction are key drivers of digital transformation journeys. Telcos can innovate with automation in service assurance processes, network automation, and customer issue management, using technologies like MongoDB to process large amounts of diverse data, generate insights, and make predictions. The future of AI/ML-based automated decision-making in telecommunications holds promise for network security and fraud mitigation, but requires addressing the challenge of working with unstructured data, which is typically more than 80% of all essential data.