The Impact of AI and Legacy Tech on Telco Security

Why It Matters

AI’s dual role amplifies both risk and defense for telecoms, making rapid modernization and collaborative regulation critical to protect essential communications infrastructure.

Key Takeaways

• AI boosts telco threat detection but also enables sophisticated attacks.
• Legacy infrastructure hampers rapid AI-driven security automation deployment.
• Operators must upgrade EDR, DLP, and playbooks for AI threats.
• Industry collaboration and dynamic regulation are essential for resilient security.
• Sovereign AI clouds give telcos control over data and model integrity.

Summary

At Futureet World 2026, Max Gasperoni, chief technology and security officer at Fast Webb and Vodafone Italy, discussed how artificial intelligence is reshaping telecom security. He framed AI as both a powerful defensive tool—enabling autonomous networks that react faster than humans—and a new attack vector, with generative models capable of scanning code, spotting vulnerabilities, and crafting exploits in seconds.

Gasperoni highlighted the friction between cutting‑edge AI defenses and the telco sector’s aging, monolithic infrastructure. Legacy systems limit the speed at which AI‑driven mitigation can be embedded, forcing operators to rely on existing EDR, DLP and telemetry tools while they retrofit playbooks for stealthy, lateral AI‑assisted threats. He stressed that true automation—where a network segment isolates itself upon detecting an anomaly—remains a few years away.

Concrete examples included Vodafone’s pilot of self‑contained GPU farms running proprietary large‑language models for internal vulnerability testing, and the plan to shift to a sovereign cloud that guarantees data integrity for B2B customers. Gasperoni also warned that human expertise remains indispensable; zero‑trust frameworks and identity management must be architected by seasoned security teams before AI agents can be trusted.

The discussion underscored that telcos must accelerate modernization, cooperate across the industry, and push regulators toward dynamic, AI‑aware guidelines. Without coordinated investment in both technology and talent, operators risk falling behind both cyber‑criminals and emerging threats such as quantum computing.

Original Description

Max Gasparroni, chief technology and security officer at Italian network operator Fastweb+Vodafone, discusses the opportunities and threats that AI poses to telcos, the challenge of protecting legacy infrastructure, how network operators can help each other, the opportunity that comes with sovereign services, and more.

Featuring: Max Gasparroni, Chief Technology and Security Officer, Fastweb + Vodafone

Recorded April 2026

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