AWS showcases approaches to autonomous networks, AI and APIs

AI and APIs have great transformative potential in many areas of telecoms. Here Jan Hofmeyr, the new Head of Telecoms at AWS, explores some of them and explains where visitors to DTW Ignite can see these ideas in action.

TM Forum: Congratulations on your new role – could you tell us about your telecoms background?

JH: I joined AWS after 12 years at Comcast where I helped build and run the X1 platform, its cloud native video platform, which we syndicated to cable companies like Cox, Shaw and others. After that, I became chief network officer. Experiencing the power of AWS cloud as a customer, I joined AWS in 2021 taking on the responsibility for AWS Edge products, Outposts and Local Zones, as well as EC2 Networking services. Then this opportunity opened to combine my AWS and telecoms experiences to help lead our efforts to support our telecom customers.

TM Forum: How can AWS help CSPs address their most important business and operational issues?

JH: For the telco industry globally, we have three focus areas in my mind. First is how can we help drive customer experience through products like AWS Connect, leveraging Gen AI to help our customers improve their customers’ experience.

Second, there is significant opportunity to help telcos continue to modernize. They've been on this journey for a while, from OSS/BSS and IT applications to the network more recently. At MWC, we received clear customer feedback to continue focusing on IT modernization. In addition, network transformation and modernization – leveraging the cloud for enhanced security, scalability and feature agility – is now possible with the launch of the new Outposts solution for 5G Core and Cloud RAN.

Thirdly, partnering with telcos to develop new services and leverage PAN-Amazon solutions that they can offer to their customers. Already, many of our customers use AWS Connect to offer Contact Center-as-a-Service to their small business and enterprise customers. Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom offer their services on amazon.com through the Amazon Marketplace. There's so much opportunity for us to help telcos grow their businesses and create joint go-to-market solutions.

TM Forum: How can autonomous networks and cloud help telcos turn their networks, especially 5G, into revenue machines?

JH: With Generative AI, more than ever, networks will become intelligent and more dynamic, increasing the value offered to customers. Two things are helping us: networks are becoming more autonomous and AI driven by design; efforts like Aduna will play a key role allowing telcos to turn their networks into products that can be offered and consumed using APIs. The combination of those two things will drive new capability and revenues.

We are encouraged by the telco industry’s efforts to create consistent network APIs across telcos globally. This will play a key role in enabling cloud applications to leverage the unique value offered by these networks and allow new monetization opportunities for operators.

The same is true across the AWS cloud continuum: Operators can run their network functions in our AWS Regions and Local Zones, as well as Outposts on premises. Consistent APIs mean customers can build their networks using the same set of AWS API services and tools wherever they need to operate networks.

TM Forum: Which demos is AWS involved in at DTW Ignite and why?

JH: Throughout the eight demos we’re involved with, you’ll see how Gen AI and AI solutions are going to be a critical capability that unblocks and enables many of these transformations. We’re encouraged by the early success we have already seen and excited about the future of fully autonomous networks.

Modern migration paths for legacy systems with generative AI shows how GenAI agents can accelerate transformations, moving from one system to another.

Predicting failures before they happen are some of the early benefits, including fault isolation and restoration, reducing outages and impairments, improving field operations effectiveness and increasing autonomous healing. AI-powered network will transform telco operations, leveraging network digital twin as a graph for operations providing real-time network monitoring, as we show in AI-orchestrated complaint prediction and automated assurance.

That said, we are in the very early stages of understanding how AI will transform networks and ultimately enable fully automated networks that self-provision and configure based on customer use cases and network capacity demands – see Agentic AI for autonomous networks.

I already spoke about Amazon Connect, a cloud-based customer contact center service from AWS that offers AI-powered features, including self-service capabilities and agent assistance, to improve efficiency and customer satisfaction. With a rapidly evolving roadmap driven by AI innovation, customers can confidently move towards an agentic future as their business and technology evolves, and we will get a preview of that with Amazon Connect-powered SMB communications as a service.

The digital twin is part of the autonomous network, as demo’d here in the Network digital twin as a graph for root cause analysis: powered with generative AI. This is about being able to apply configuration changes in complex networks in the twin, prior to production, to get a real representation of what the outcome will be before you do it. Humans want to see and validate. This is an important step in being able to visualize exactly what the outcome will be before making changes.

Maximize 5G revenues with agentic AI for network slicing shows 5G networks are becoming mature enough to offer slicing. AI will play an important role in how we offer slices to make the most of that capability, to offer it dynamically, on demand, maximizing the use of the available network capacity.

Telefonica's ageing in place solution powered by pan-Amazon partnership is about harnessing smart home-type technology to keep older or frail people safe in their own homes.

Finally, in Telco AI fellows: pioneering the future of AI-native telecommunications, we have demos jointly-hosted by AWS Startups and NVIDIA Inception programs that showcase how startups, like Arcee AI, DataStax, BRIA AI, Sand Technologies, Personal AI, and Archetype AI, are helping telcos adopt data and AI solutions.