Autonomous operations for rapid AIOps and intent-driven 5G adoption by enterprise customers

Commercial context

5G has brought about a renaissance in CSP innovation, creating new ways to add value for enterprise customers. Across verticals, there’s a clear realization that network capabilities far exceed what they were ten or even five years ago, and the ultra-low latency and data-intensive applications it enables are already having a transformative impact. But partnering with enterprise to realize 5G projects is often a complex, resource-intensive exercise, requiring various kinds of manual input – presenting considerable barriers to CSP and customer alike.

Streamlining how CSPs interact with their potential customers, and ultimately simplifying adoption, is therefore key to capitalizing on the 5G opportunity. The answer lies in building an automated means of determining customer needs and matching them with CSP capabilities – one in which a customer can state their requirements simply in zero-touch ways, and have a next-generation solution presented to them along with an agreement on offers, prices and SLAs. By making 5G slices easily and quickly available for B2B2X propositions, CSPs can drive growth in revenues and achieve ROI on their considerable investments in 5G infrastructure.

The solution

This is the purpose of the Unlocking revenue and efficiency with intent-driven autonomous operations - Phase III Catalyst which, throughout its iterations, has been crafting a revolutionary approach to how vertical industries and CSPs engage with each other. Phase III of the Catalyst introduces autonomous behavior and operations, enabling CSPs to support the existing solution with optimized network AIOps and resource allocation according to customer needs. By using TMF 921 (the Intent Management API), the Catalyst team has been able to instate network-aware, outcome-driven and resource-optimized, contextually intelligent autonomous operations across businesses, services and networks.

This enables CSPs to gain full control over their networks through advanced observability, deep intent understanding, AIOps-driven intelligence, and closed-loop automation. The result is autonomous operations at every layer, from customer-centric offers and pricing, to intent-driven ops throughout the lifecycle of services and network slices, as well as network operations themselves. These are derived intelligently – taking into account the unique context of any given scenario – so that business intent generates service intent, which in turn determines resource intent.

Wider value

This helps CSPs reduce time-to-market for new 5G services, generate higher revenues, reduce OpEx, improve efficiency savings, and reduce energy consumption, while gaining greater control over their networks. For customers, this means a vastly improved experience and quality of service, and swifter realization of their own 5G ambitions. By reducing time-to-market barriers so dramatically the solution has enabled campaign launches in as little as an hour, while reductions in energy consumption of up to 30% have translated directly into OpEx savings and CO2 emissions. Improved personalization has yielded a twenty-fold increase in CSP marketplace visits through the pilot phase, with recommendation take-up rates increasing by nine times, driving considerable growth in CSP revenues.

The solution is therefore showing great promise in becoming a key industry-wide solution to how to use AIOps to reduce friction in B2B2X partnerships. According to Takuya Miyasaka, Senior Manager at KDDI Research, “intent technology in telecommunication services can lead to significant direct benefits, such as more personalized services, increased efficiency, and reduced energy consumption, as demonstrated in our Catalyst project. Moreover, adopting standardized systems and interoperable solutions can promote innovation, competition, cost savings, and the digital transformation of society. With these gains there are new business opportunities, improved productivity, economic growth, and most importantly enhanced welfare of all.”