In ossified companies like telcos there's also the issue that the limitations of the existing equipment are being worked around with people. Those people derive their salaries from it, their manager derives his salary + prestige from managing such a headcount, and so on.

While the top brass might indeed be interested and benefit from more automation and a network that mostly runs itself, it's a bad deal for effectively everyone else in the company, so any attempts in that direction will never end up anywhere.

That's why legacy companies have been talking about "digital transformation" for decades now, yet it never progresses past simply digitizing the paperwork (and often creating more of it due to reduced friction), because enough people derive their job from said paperwork to make actual digital transformation politically untenable and impossible to deliver due to constant sabotage.