At Mobile Europe’s The Briefing event in October, Jose María Ramón Pardo, Autonomous Networks and AI Senior Manager at Telefonica, shared how the company is building the foundations for truly autonomous networks. His presentation offered a clear picture of why automation is no longer optional for operators and how Telefonica is reshaping its operations to meet rising expectations across efficiency, agility and customer experience.
He began by setting out the reality for major operators today. Networks are growing in complexity and customers expect faster services, better reliability and more sustainable operations. At the same time, operators face pressure to support new business models and new digital services. Fortunately, the industry is benefiting from cloud native architectures and software driven networks, which make advanced automation and AI techniques far easier to apply than in the past.
Telefonica describes its evolution in three broad phases. The first phase involved building a basic automation foundation, mainly using rule based systems, device level scripting and early machine learning. Progress was held back by monolithic architectures and vendor dependency, which limited the scale of automation that was possible. The second phase marked the beginning of the company’s Autonomous Network Journey programme, which introduced data driven processes, orchestration, the first closed loop systems and centres of excellence for AI. Machine learning became part of day to day operations, although intelligence was still limited.
Telefonica is now in the phase it calls hyper automation. The company is accelerating its autonomous network ambitions by embedding AI directly into network platforms and operational processes. It is deploying generative AI, digital twins and agent based systems, while investing in the knowledge bases required to support more context aware intelligence. The goal is to enable networks that can plan, adjust, repair and optimise with minimal human intervention.
The Autonomous Network Journey programme brings these efforts together across four dimensions. The first covers the physical network and the shift to open architecture, virtualisation, cloudification and data centre consolidation, along with the retirement of legacy technologies such as 3G and copper. The second dimension is known as the brain, which focuses on the automation platform that manages data, orchestration, knowledge and decision making. The third involves adapting processes along the full service lifecycle, from planning through to operations, to take advantage of autonomous capabilities. The fourth dimension is people, covering skills, culture, organisational structures and new ways of working.
Telefonica tracks its progress using KPIs that include the TM Forum autonomy levels to benchmark maturity across domains. The company has already deployed hundreds of autonomous use cases across its markets, supported by a range of AI techniques. In planning, an AI driven design solution has cut fibre planning time from 60 days to less than a week. In Germany, a large scale digital twin enables mobile site configuration changes to be simulated and optimised before any live implementation, reducing planning and analysis time significantly and helping prevent capacity issues.
Operational use cases are also demonstrating clear value. In Brazil, AI driven self healing in the 5G core detects and resolves anomalies without manual intervention and has reduced average repair times. Agent based systems allow technicians to interact with IP networks using natural language. Large language models support internal documentation queries, and generative AI is used to improve contract management and workforce efficiency.
Looking ahead, Telefonica aims to move beyond isolated use cases to an environment where automation can be delivered at scale. This requires focusing on high value use cases, ensuring the cost to deploy is justified by the expected benefit, and enhancing the automation platform so that new use cases can be rolled out consistently across all network layers. AI needs to be integrated across the full lifecycle of the network and the company continues to explore new techniques such as intelligent agents, large language models and synthetic data generation.
Telefonica is also strengthening its governance approach to ensure responsible and effective use of AI. Collaboration remains important, with partnerships across the vendor ecosystem and other operators helping to accelerate innovation.
Although AI plays a central role, the company emphasises that real transformation depends on more than AI alone. Open architectures, high quality data, knowledge representation, redesigned processes and new organisational models are all essential to make autonomous networks a reality. Automation is considered mandatory for achieving efficiency, enabling new revenue opportunities and meeting the demands of customers and society.
Telefonica’s message is clear. AI and automation are reshaping telecom operations, but success depends on a balanced strategy that combines intelligent technology with architectural readiness, robust data foundations and a workforce prepared for new ways of working. The journey is well underway, and the early results show the promise of a more autonomous network future.
His talk is embedded below:
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