I Gave AI Agents a Telecom Job Interview. Most Failed Without a Cheat Sheet

Introduction Telecoms is one of the most API-driven industries on the planet. TM Forum has standardised hundreds of operations workflows across product catalogs, customer management, incident response, network topology, billing, and performance monitoring. If AI agents are going to automate telecom operations, they need to work reliably across all of them. I wanted to find out: can today's open-weight LLMs actually do this? And if not — what closes the gap? The answer led me to build something I'm calling SKILLS - a benchmark framework and a set of portable domain skill documents that give AI agents the operational knowledge they need to execute real telecom workflows. This is obviously a play on the terms Skills. Agent Skills are a new standard and according to https://agentskills.io are folders of instructions, scripts, and resources that agents can discover and use to do things more accurately and efficiently. This article covers what I built, what I found, and why the results matte