Nokia's AgenticOps approach for reliable Autonomous Networks

In our previous blog “Agentic AI: Powering the Next Frontier in Autonomous Operations”, we explored how Agentic AI is redefining telco operations. Now, we unveil Nokia’s unique strategic approach to autonomy: one built on sound fundamentals and leveraging Agentic AI together with measures like AIOps, to deliver a realistic and sustainable path to reliable network autonomy.

The foundation: A robust data-driven architecture

Nokia’s AgenticOps is built on a modular, end-to-end autonomy architecture purpose-built for telecom. It begins with a robust data governance framework ensuring high-quality data, which is critical for AI and automation. At its core lies a unified data fabric featuring a telco-specific data layer, an ontology engine, model management, and an agentic framework with an agentic studio. This powerful combination empowers specialized, goal-driven agents with structured, semantically rich information, enabling advanced reasoning, intelligent correlations, and effective decision-making within dynamic operational contexts. While the blueprint includes all the key elements, it is designed with flexibility to interwork with platforms and systems in telecommunication provider environments.

The agentic framework provides essential orchestration, guardrails, and policy-based conflict management, guiding agent behavior while ensuring auditability, traceability, and explainability for reliable, scalable operations. With flexible delivery models, such as as-a-service (aaS), hosted, or hybrid, our solution offers rapid onboarding, cloud-native scalability, and a lower total cost of ownership. Designed for openness, it seamlessly ingests and acts on multi-vendor, multi-domain data, making true level 4+ autonomy a tangible reality, not just a faraway dream.

The hybrid advantage: AIOps and AgenticOps in harmony

While AIOps has delivered remarkable advancements in detection and monitoring, a critical "reasoning gap" has often hindered true end-to-end autonomy. This is precisely where AgenticOps steps in. At Nokia, we believe the path to self-managing networks lies in a powerful hybrid AIOps-AgenticOps approach, leveraging the right AI for the right task.

• AIOps as the foundation: For the sheer scale of telecom networks, processing millions of events and billions of performance counters daily, AIOps provides essential, continuous, and resource-efficient monitoring. It acts as our always-on intelligence layer, correlating vast data streams, detecting anomalies, and generating critical triggers for deeper intervention.
• AgenticOps for deep reasoning and action: When AIOps triggers activate, AgenticOps shines. We reserve these sophisticated, goal-driven agents for complex analysis, cognitive reasoning, nuanced understanding, precise decision-making, and generating targeted actions. They operate with persistent context, ensuring intelligent and effective responses to critical incidents, enabling the leap to autonomous action, filtering operational noise, intelligently triaging, synthesizing optimal solutions, and adaptively executing them.

Looking at a real-world example:  AIOps predicts a VoLTE service degradation, triggering an agent to perform causality-based analysis for root cause identification. This input then activates another agent to generate the appropriate rectification action, which is validated for accuracy and subsequently executed in a closed-loop fashion. 

This balanced design ensures scalable, real-time network operations while maintaining the analytical depth required for the most critical challenges. It's a testament to Nokia's strategic mindset: leveraging the right AI for the right task, building truly autonomous networks that are both efficient and profoundly intelligent.

What makes Nokia’s approach superior?

Our unwavering commitment to taking the right action in the right manner truly sets Nokia's AgenticOps apart. Nokia's AgenticOps stands out through its pragmatic, safety-first, and human-centric approach, reflecting our deep understanding of telecommunications environments:

• Progressive path to autonomy: We don't demand an immediate, risky leap. AgenticOps supports a gradual progression through TM Forum's autonomy levels with explicit stage gates and measurable readiness criteria. Telecommunication providers build confidence through operational evidence, progressing from recommendations to supervised execution and ultimately to full autonomy based on demonstrated reliability.
• Defense-in-depth safety mechanisms: Our framework embeds multi-layered safety directly into the architecture: needed safety controls, guardrails governing agent operations, simulation of predicted outcomes against a digital twin and sophisticated mechanisms to monitor accuracy and confidence against calibrated thresholds.
• Augmenting human expertise: AgenticOps augments, rather than replaces, human expertise. Our design incorporates essential human intervention and supervision with approval points until models achieve greater maturity and determinism.
• Comprehensive auditability: A modular approach ensures full traceability, explainability, and transparency for every decision and action taken by collaborating agents.

Is it time to go agentic?

Autonomous operations are no longer a distant vision; they are a business imperative for telecommunication providers navigating escalating complexity and competitive pressures. AgenticOps is not just "smart automation"; it’s a strategic transformation lever redefining how networks are managed and optimized, and so the question is not 'if', but 'when', 'where', and 'how'. A very safe place to start would be with use cases that assist humans in dealing with topics that are tedious, time-consuming, or require context-sensitive actions. It might be wise to start with agents in a ‘recommendation’ mode until they demonstrate consistent performance with low failure rates, thereby earning the right to ‘autonomous’ execution.

To unlock its full potential, AgenticOps must be applied thoughtfully, starting with high-value areas where risks can be effectively managed. Nokia advocates a nuanced approach with suitable guardrails, policy gates, and validation mechanisms, such as digital twins, ensuring that only actions demonstrating acceptable simulated outcomes advance to deployment. Robust security and risk mitigation strategies should be integrated from the outset, rather than being added as an afterthought. 

Future-proofing autonomy with AgenticOps

Agentic AI not only accelerates the path to full autonomy but also lays the groundwork for the next frontier in intelligent operations. Think about agents for service design, intent resolution, multi-domain orchestration, proactive threat hunting, and contextual issue analysis, all deriving auto recommendations and generating resolution actions. Fully autonomous networks are well within reach! This progression sets the stage for networks that not only execute tasks but also continuously learn, reason, and refine their own objectives in alignment with business strategy. With Nokia’s AgenticOps at the core, telecommunication providers can future-proof their autonomy journey, ensuring the network remains agile, intelligent, and ready for what comes next.

Find out more about our Autonomous Networks Solutions here.