Sparring Partners | The decomposable AI landscape

AI will change the way we operate telecom networks. But what’s the best way to get there? How should we introduce AI to get the benefits it promises but avoid duplication, conflicts among different AI models, and undesired outcomes? How do we know AI models will deliver what we expect?

In this Sparring Partners, Per Kangru and Takai Eddine Kennouche at VIAVI Solutions shared their AIOps practical experience and vision for integrating AI and ML in network operations in an efficient and streamlined way and preserving the reliability and quality of experience that are non-negotiable.

• AI will play a role in multiple network functions and use cases. Which contribution should be centralized, and which distributed?
• What is the role of AIOps, AI testing AI, digital twins, and prompt engineering in making AI succeed?
• How can operators avoid the AI lock-in? Should they embrace hyperscalers and their big models or develop in-house solutions?

Conversation timestamps:

• 00:00 Introduction
• 05:42 Per and Takai introduce themselves
• 07:23 Hype and reality, expectations
• 09:44 What operators need
• 12:11 What it takes to get AI to work, foundations, reliability; talent and technology; scalability
• 16:46 ROI for AI models and specific use cases, where does the value come from?
• 19:39 Composable AI, customization, reuse, domain-specific approaches; open-source, interoperability; CI/CD
• 23:21 Use cases, sustainability and energy efficiency, AI is good at what humans are not good at
• 29:30 RIC, xApps, rApps
• 32:39 Feeding the right data to the models, network architecture, RIC and Open RAN, generating data to feed to the models
• 46:24 Cultural change driven by AI
• 51:18 Customer feedback; need to talk about the value of AI; more on use cases, more on Open RAN
• 58:35 Role of hyperscaler, AI lock-in, regulation, GenAI, adversarial learning
• 1:03:51 How to adopt decomposable AI