As we enter 2025, AI will continue to be in the spotlight. How to harness AI to increase efficiency, streamline costs, and achieve a competitive differentiation is top of mind for our enterprise customers and partners. As AI continues evolve at a breath-taking pace, Ericsson Enterprise Wireless Solutions is at the forefront of integrating the latest AI technology into our NetCloud management and orchestration solution.
AI integration brings many tangible benefits to our customers. In an environment where networking IT teams are always under pressure to achieve more with less, the new AI capabilities enable increase productivity, simplify operations, and enhance the application quality of experience. For CIOs and networking IT teams these innovations also help kick start their organizations’ AI journey by helping them gain an understanding of the potential of AI and start imagining other areas where it could be leveraged.
What are the new AI Innovations?
Our AI-based NetCloud Assistant, ANA, is now Large Language Model (LLM) based.
To allow NetCloud customers to take full advantage of transformative impacts of Gen AI (GenAI), Ericsson Enterprise Wireless Solutions has evolved ANA to be LLM-based. ANA can now read, understand, and infer to generate new content. This allows for a much more powerful experience when communicating with ANA, since answers to questions can be directly responded to with concise summaries based on information gathered from multiple sources. ANA derives intelligence based on data gathered from NetCloud, as well as, from our technical documentation library to generate contextual responses to queries.
ANA delivers personalized answers that enhance productivity.
Whereas traditional chatbots can provide rapid search capabilities to gather existing source documents that relate to questions asked from administrators, ANA can correlate the information gathered from multiple technical documents and insights from the customers unique network environment to provide personalized responses. This capability has a real productivity advantage, reducing the need for network administrators to read information from multiple sources and then try to manually correlate that information to their own network, potentially transforming hours or even days of work into minutes or seconds.
ANA is secure and based on internally hosted Large Language Models.
One of the challenges with traditional chatbots is that to take advantage of GenAI functionality, they leverage Application Program Interface (API) calls to third-party GenAI applications such as ChatGPT. With this approach, it is not easy to distinguish what queries are being answered by the vendor’s AI-chatbot and which queries are being answered by the externally hosted LLM. This means inadvertent data leaks could occur.
ANA is based on LLMs that are entirely hosted within Ericsson’s environment. This design enhances user and data privacy by keeping all queries internal and away from consumer web-based applications. It also ensures that ANA is a true expert on Ericsson solutions and technologies, rather than just being Artificial Generalized Intelligence (AGI) like the popular consumer applications.
ANA generates multi-modal content.
Traditional chatbots are confined to text and hyperlink-based responses. One of the biggest values of being GenAI-based is the fact that ANA will soon offer the ability to generate pie charts, bar graphs or tables customized to the user’s queries context. Available for preview at the NRF event this week in New York (GA in 1H2025), this capability allows for ANA to portray complex data in a visual format for easy human consumption. These graphs and charts go beyond NetCloud’s standard reports and dashboards and are built leveraging multiple data sources within both NetCloud’s data lake and Ericsson’s documentation library.
ANA can accelerate day 1 deployments.
Rather than leveraging technical documentation to configure a new Ericsson WWAN edge device, ANA will be able to provide a recipe that offers concise step by step instructions on how to configure that device according to best practices.
ANA improves mean time to repair for common issues.
ANA helps troubleshoot common connectivity and reachability issues with our WAN edge devices and our SD-WAN and security gateway. Rather than the administrator having to perform port scans, run speed tests and wade through documentation, ANA will isolate the issue for the administrator helping to improve mean time to repair.
Extension of our AIOps capabilities to enhance quality of experience over cellular and hybrid WANs.
Complementing ANA is a NetCloud AIOps dashboard which baselines all the traffic unique to a customer’s specific network. It can detect performance-driven anomalies, such as variations in latency and jitter, that could become service impacting if not dealt with in a timely manner. Providing these insights in cellular network performance and application quality of experience empowers IT teams to proactively address issues to ensure optimal network operations and to enhance digital experience for end users.
Specifically, this dashboard:
- Pinpoints latency and jitter related anomalies unique to the customer’s network (loss will be available soon).
- Flags each anomaly with the appropriate severity (critical, moderate, or minor)
- Calculates a sphere of impact, identifying all the sites, users, and applications that either are or could be impacted.
- Offers a root cause analysis as to why the anomaly has occurred. For example, pinpointing whether higher than usual latency is occurring because of a slow application server, congestion on the carrier network or another internal or external factor.
- Provides recommended remediation for the administrator to act on.
Today, the NetCloud AIOps dashboard is available to NetCloud SASE/NetCloud Exchange customers with the appropriate licensing. A version of this dashboard will be available to Wireless WAN customers in 1H2025, with an advanced license, to enhance resiliency and application quality of experience.
What’s next in our AI-driven future?
Another current AI innovation is the ability to support an agentic architecture that supports independent AI agents working collaboratively on different tasks. These agents work together using advanced reasoning and planning skills to solve complex, multi-step problems, with large language models acting as their “brains” for decision-making. The benefit is that it allows for virtual experts to execute multiple tasks in parallel. This allows for more complex responses to be generated and even cross checked, allowing for more accuracy with a faster turnaround time.
Available for demonstration purposes only (GA to follow) is the ability to translate business requirements into networking policies – a keen example of agentic AI.
As many administrators know, the translation of business requirements into the specific policies that must be implemented across the network can be complex. ANA will remove this complexity by allowing administrators to specify their business requirements for their critical applications in plain English. ANA can then translate these requirements into traffic-class definitions and traffic steering policies to achieve the desired business outcome – even explaining the details of the policy so administrators know what they are deploying and what the impact on traffic will be. This ability to generate policies will be part of the NRF demonstrations in New York and will be GA in 1H2025.
Summary
As AI technology continues to evolve at a rapid pace, Ericsson Enterprise Wireless solutions is committed to staying at the forefront, so that this technology can be used to simplify the entire lifecycle of our 5G/LTE solutions and continue to allow even the leanest IT teams to do more with less. Stay tuned for future developments in this area.