MEF18 - Jan Karlsson, Ericsson - The State of Automation and AI in Telecoms

MEF18, 29 Oct - 2 Nov - Jan Karlsson, SVP & Head of Business Area Digital Services, Ericsson, shares his perspective on the state of automation and artificial intelligence in the communications industry.

New Market Realities
"Technology is amazing. The pace of the innovation is really accelerating." 5G, in particular, presents exciting new use cases. But we're also seeing a big increase in network complexity associated with capitalizing on these use cases. This complexity includes things like RAN densification, provisioning and monitizing 5G network slices, distributed clouds, and heterogenous networks.

Assessing Automation Progress
Five years ago, we had high expectations related to the promise of network automation -- an agile network with short time to market, no vendor lock-in, lower capital and operational costs, a platform for 5G services, and automated operations.

But candidly, this is very complicated work with numerous challenges. For example, "...the complexity in integrating. It's not really plug-and-play. There's a lack of standards, which is why MEF is so fundamentally important."

Part of the challenge "...is also related to technology being maybe too prioritized. This is really a change management which spans across the organization - business, operations, processes, process simplification - maybe more centralization compared to before."

Full Automation - Key to Meeting Future Demands
Telecom is lagging behind a number of industry verticals like e-commerce and the web-scale players when it comes to the transition to automation.

"This is a transformation. It is something that requires a lot of effort. Typically short cuts are not really possible. Is it optional? Can I live without automation and AI? Maybe today. Definitely not tomorrow."

Jan shares an example of Verizon's success in automating VNF operations.

Going Forward with Automation
It is time to take action across many dimensions, including collaboration and standardization. "MEF is an extremely important body that we need to capitalize on."

"This is not optional. This is a must for us an industry. If we don't do this. We will not be able to capitalize on the 5G opportunities."

Save the date for MEF19, 18-22 November 2019, JW Marriott, LA LIVE, Los Angeles.