Nokia is expanding its autonomous networking strategy through a partnership with Amazon Web Services, adding new AI capabilities to help telecom providers automate network operations and manage complex infrastructure.
The announcement, made at DTW Ignite, highlights an industry effort to transform telecom networks from manually operated systems into highly automated platforms capable of making operational decisions with limited human intervention.
Nokia’s Autonomous Networks Fabric is a platform that combines automation, observability, analytics and security functions. Under the expanded agreement, Nokia will make the platform available on AWS, allowing service providers to run a larger portion of their operational environment in the cloud while taking advantage of AWS’s AI and ML services.
Nokia said the Fabric is geared to support Level 4 network autonomy, a stage at which networks can automatically analyze conditions, make decisions and execute actions while remaining under operator oversight.
The platform incorporates several technologies aimed at reducing operational complexity. These include unified data management across network domains, intent-based networking that translates business objectives into automated actions, digital twin simulations for evaluating changes before deployment, and agentic AI capabilities for service operations and optimization.
The AWS deployment also builds on Nokia applications already available through the cloud provider, including tools for network orchestration, assurance and inventory management.
Telecom operators face increasing pressure to support AI-driven services, growing data traffic and more sophisticated network architectures. Rather than managing separate mobile, fixed and transport environments through disconnected tools, operators want platforms capable of coordinating operations across multiple domains.
Nokia CTO for AI and Autonomous Networks Oguz Sunay described autonomous networking as a business necessity rather than a long-term vision, pointing to the convergence of cloud-native infrastructure, agentic AI and intent-based networking as key components of future telecom operations.
Continued Collaboration
The companies have already collaborated on several projects. Earlier this year, Nokia and AWS demonstrated what they described as the industry’s first agentic AI-powered network slicing implementation in a live 5G environment. The project used AI agents built with Amazon Bedrock to automate network slicing operations with minimal human involvement.
Alongside the AWS announcement, Nokia introduced a new Autonomous Networks Agent Library containing pre-built AI agents for telecom operations. The library includes agents designed for security monitoring, anomaly investigation, event triage, service-order troubleshooting and coordinated multi-agent workflows.
To bolster security, Nokia said the new agents can help identify zero-day threats, accelerate incident response and improve operational efficiency. According to the company, productivity gains from these automated workflows can range from 60% to 80% compared with traditional security operations.
Nokia also updated its Autonomous Networks Suite with new deployment options, enhanced observability capabilities, Voice over LTE service quality management and tools aimed at improving radio access network subscriber experiences.
In optical networking, Nokia added a new authentication framework to its WaveSuite software platform. New capabilities include proactive KPI anomaly detection and photonic equipment failure identification, giving operators earlier visibility into potential network issues.
