Swedish telecommunications company Ericsson is reportedly advancing its push to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) into telecom products and services, aiming for fully autonomous network operations. The company has established AI accelerator hubs in North America, Sweden, and India to develop AI-driven solutions for telecom challenges, according to an ET report.
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Gen AI Powers Autonomous Network Operations
Chandru Sargor, head of the Global AI Accelerator India team, reportedly highlighted that while initial challenges focused on data and proving AI's value, the company has now matured its AI capabilities. Ericsson is leveraging generative AI to orchestrate AI agents that can autonomously gather and analyse network data, enabling real-time network reasoning and management.
"The initial struggle was to have the right kind of data, and mostly about proving that AI could add value. But over the last several years, we have moved past that and our focus has been on bringing AI into our products," said Chandru Sargor, who heads the Global AI Accelerator India team, according to the report.
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Progress in AI-Driven Network Autonomy
Sargor reportedly added that many traditional AI algorithms are now mature enough to be used commercially in the products. The company plans to achieve AI-driven network autonomy using generative AI next, he said.
"Using generative AI, we can orchestrate a number of AI agents that we have developed using traditional AI technologies. These generative AI agents can then call upon the right agent at the right time to get the right information, build up information about the current state of the network, and then use that to reason about what's happening in the network," the executive was quoted as saying in the report, adding that the technology will have a real transformative effect in network operations.
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Ericsson Language Intelligence Platform
Ericsson has also developed its own AI language models via the Ericsson Language Intelligence platform. Originally designed for telecom-related search and troubleshooting, the platform is now evolving to support generative AI agents, simplifying network operations and bringing Ericsson closer to its vision of fully autonomous networks.
"We have matured the platform beyond the initial search capabilities. The search is something it can do very well, answer questions about telecom, about problems that you may be facing in the network, and how you can solve it, based on the information that already exists including our technical documentation, our trouble tickets, technical reports, and so forth," Sargor reportedly said.
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Gen AI based Agent Architecture
"Now we are leveraging the same platform to build the generative AI-based agent architecture that you will see in the demo," he reportedly added, explaining that these are a layer of agents that will abstract what is happening in the network, so that the operator can interact in a simplified way.
However, according to the report, these agents are still in the early stages of development, which will eventually lead to networks becoming truly autonomous.
