Post by Fast Company Middle East

Telecom has cycled through this before. 5G was supposed to be the leap. Then came cloud-native cores, then a wave of AI-driven automation, each pitched in turn as the shift that would finally make networks run themselves. Rohit Chowdhary, Head of Advanced Consulting Services EMEA at Nokia, believes a fourth shift is underway, one that could fundamentally change how networks are built, operated and maintained. “It’s a year of agents,” he says. Software-defined networks opened the door to automating deployment, testing, migration and upgrades. AI added another layer, sifting through operational data at a scale and speed no human team could match. But a gap remained. AI could flag anomalies, parse alarms, and forecast failures. Acting on any of it was still left to people. Chowdhary doesn’t see engineers being replaced. He sees experienced telecom professionals becoming the ones who train, validate and improve the AI itself. “We are seeing how it is, first of all, reducing the manual effort,” he says. “But then the humans who are involved in doing the jobs are helping to build this AI.” Nokia recently expanded its collaboration with NVIDIA, whose chips are increasingly being used for AI inference closer to end users. For telecom operators, that means networks are taking on a larger role in supporting computing workloads. If the past decade was defined by the race to build faster networks, the next may be defined by the race to make them autonomous. Read more: https://lnkd.in/gk6e-Zwh