- Microsoft has built AI agents to help run its global network
- It wants to help telcos deploy similar technology to automate their own networks
- The goal is less downtime and faster resolution when issues arise
In the quest to build autonomous networks, it turns out telecom operators aren’t the only ones eager for success. Cloud giant are both rooting for their telco partners and bringing new AI capabilities to the table.
Silvia Candiani, Microsoft’s VP of Telco, Media, Entertainment and Gaming, told Fierce Microsoft has a sprawling network that connects its global footprint of data centers. While it owns most of the latter it leases the former, meaning it relies heavily on partners in the telecom realm. Thus, the tech titan has a “vested interest” in telcos adopting AI and other tools to facilitate autonomous networking because these could help reduce downtime for Microsoft’s data centers.
“When you look into the details of what a network engineer needs to do when an incident arises, we’ve seen examples where the time to resolution can be reduced with the assistance of AI by 80%,” she said.
How does Microsoft know? Well, it turns out it has already built an army of Network Operations Agents (NOA) and deployed AI to help run its own network. A NOA reference architecture and pilot environment was made available to operators in June.
As Microsoft put it in a blog announcing the NOA launch, “These AI companions ingest real-time telemetry, topology graphs, historical tickets, and vendor manuals; reason over anomalies; then recommend—or even execute—remediation steps under strict guardrails.”
According to Candiani, Microsoft’s own NOA deployment sprang into action in the wake of a recent subsea cable cut.
“We had to deploy alternative routing for the traffic. That happened in the night and all of the agents got activated on our behalf, evaluating alternative routing and contacting partners,” she said. “It creates the opportunity for 24/7, maximum impact compared to what a human could do.”
Candiani continued: “We know what it is to deploy AI in the networks, we’ve seen the impacts firsthand…I do believe in a sense we do need to be role models on AI.”
Microsoft isn’t the only one taking this approach. Google Cloud earlier this year told Fierce it was planning to make its expansive fiber network fully autonomous by the end of this year. It subsequently unveiled its Autonomous Network Operations framework to help telcos do the same.