- A Rakuten Symphony executive said operators shouldn’t “fall to peer pressure” and just do AI for its own sake
- A Xius executive said installing a second core network would provide a safe way to test AI models
- And a Tejas Networks executive said operators should start small and use AI to model one pain point
COMPETITIVE CARRIERS ASSOCIATION (CCA), LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY — A panel at the CCA show this week spoke to small, regional wireless carriers about their use of automation and AI, and perhaps the most interesting question was: “If you had one piece of advice to give to a competitive carrier just starting on their automation journey, what would that be?”
Prajith Dhanapalan is head of Solutions and Private Networks at Xius, a company that provides wireless core technology. So perhaps it isn’t surprising that he said the best way to rise to higher levels of automation is to introduce another core to their wireless network in order to experiment with automation of their business use cases. “We can put a second core, and they can do a lot experiments,” said Dhanapalan.
But Ahmed Abdelaziz, VP of Automation and Network Transformation at Rakuten Symphony, recommended that small operators “not fall to peer pressure.”
Fierce caught up with Abdelaziz after the panel and asked for clarification on that advice. He said there's a lot of hype around things such as agentic AI, and this is making operators feel pressured to jump on the bandwagon. “Sometimes agentic AI might not be the best use case to start with for a rural operator,” he explained.
Abdelaziz added, “Sometimes having a unified inventory and tracking all of your warehouses becomes your most important use cases. And this is where your money is because you have a lot of untracked warehouse and a lot of contract inventory.”
This might sound kind of mundane, but it’s critical to clean up technical debt and have a reliable and accurate set of data before embarking on automation and AI goals. Sometimes automation begins with simple things. Think software updates and firewall rules.
Abdelaziz said some small wireless providers might have their inventory and warehouses tracked properly, but they’re lacking in automation. “You see that 70% of your network action is run by a human being without being verified by a system, and it's causing either havoc, incidents, complaints or even lawsuits. So, you should focus your energy there.”
Ultimately, small operators will want to leverage their data and infrastructure to do real AI and agentic AI.
Varun Kapoor, head of Wireless Product Strategy and Business for Americas with Tejas Networks, said operators should start small and use AI to address one pain point. For example, they may want to start with one-band coverage enhancement.
Kapoor said, “So start small. It actually will also allow you to build confidence and then move on.”
Abdelaziz summed it up, saying doing AI for the sake of doing AI is not really the point. “The most important thing is to have a system you can run that’s stable, reliable and in the most cost-efficient manner.”
AI should be used to help those goals.