Generative AI for Network Operations Centers

AI is reshaping the way telecommunication providers operate their networks, including network modeling and simulation, cybersecurity, and logistics and routing optimization. Generative AI lets telcos interact with their networks in new, powerful ways to proactively monitor performance and predict potential degradations and customer impact. This includes responding to queries on critical issues, identifying incidents within specified time frames, and recommending solutions. When field technicians are called out to the physical network, dynamic route optimization and virtual field agent assistants improve the speed and accuracy of service, enhancing customer satisfaction while reducing travel time and fuel costs.

Generative AI applications can guide network planning. Virtual assistants support field technicians by answering specific questions around network planning to find unused resources and capacity. In addition, generative AI can provide insights into network failures and performance degradations with prioritization of network fallout to limit impacts.

Global telecommunications companies are exploring how to cost-effectively deliver new AI applications to the edge over 5G and upcoming 6G networks. With NVIDIA accelerated computing and AI, telcos, cloud service providers (CSPs), and enterprises can build high-performance cloud-native networks—both fixed and wireless—with improved energy efficiency and security. 

The NVIDIA AI Foundry for Generative AI

The NVIDIA AI foundry—which includes NVIDIA AI Foundation models, the NVIDIA NeMo™ framework and tools, and NVIDIA DGX™ Cloud—gives enterprises an end-to-end solution for developing custom generative AI. 

Amdocs, a leading software and services provider, plans to build custom large language models (LLMs) for the $1.7 trillion global telecommunications industry using the NVIDIA AI foundry service on Microsoft Azure. In network operations, Amdocs and NVIDIA are exploring ways to generate solutions that address configuration, coverage, and performance issues as they arise, including:  

• Building a generative AI assistant to answer questions around network planning
• Providing insights and prioritization for network outages and performance degradations
• Optimizing operations by using generative AI to monitor, predict, and resolve network issues, manage resources in real time​, monitor network diagnostics, analyze service and user impact, prioritize impact-based recommendations, and execute orchestration activation

ServiceNow is integrating generative AI capabilities into their Now Platform and enriching all workflows with Now Assist, their generative AI assistant. ServiceNow leverages NeMo and NVIDIA Triton™ Inference Server (both part of NVIDIA AI Enterprise), NVIDIA AI Foundation models, and DGX systems to build, customize, and deploy generative AI models for telecom customers. These include use cases in network operations:

• Automated service assurance: Distill and act on volumes of complex technical data generated from network incidents​ and summarized by generative AI.
• Streamlined service delivery​: Dynamically create order tasks with generative AI to reduce human errors, ensure accurate service delivery, and improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.
• Optimized network design: Manage diverse network services, local configurations, and rulings to improve network design.

NeMo provides an end-to-end solution—including enterprise-grade support, security, and stability—across the LLM pipeline, from data processing to training to inference of generative AI models. It allows telcos to quickly train, customize, and deploy LLMs at scale, reducing time to solution while increasing return on investment.

Once generative AI models are built, fine-tuned, and trained, NeMo enables seamless deployment through optimized inference on virtually any data center or cloud. NeMo Retriever, a collection of generative AI microservices, provides world-class information retrieval with the lowest latency, highest throughput, and maximum data privacy, enabling organizations to generate insights in real time. NeMo Retriever enhances generative AI applications with enterprise-grade retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), which can be connected to business data wherever it resides.

NVIDIA DGX Cloud is an AI-training-as-a-service platform, offering a serverless experience for enterprise developers that’s optimized for generative AI. Enterprises can experience performance-optimized, enterprise-grade NVIDIA AI Foundation models directly from a browser and customize them using proprietary data with NeMo on DGX Cloud.

NVIDIA AI Enterprise for Accelerated Data Science and Logistics Optimization

The NVIDIA AI Enterprise software suite enables quicker time to results for AI and machine learning initiatives, while improving cost-effectiveness. Using analytics and machine learning, telecom operators can maximize the number of completed jobs per field technician​, dispatch the right personnel for each job, dynamically optimize routing based on real-time weather conditions​, scale to thousands of locations​, and save billions of dollars in maintenance.

AT&T is transforming their operations and enhancing sustainability by using NVIDIA-powered AI for processing data, optimizing fleet routing, and building digital avatars for employee support and training. AT&T first adopted the NVIDIA RAPIDS™ Accelerator for Apache Spark to capitalize on energy-efficient GPUs across their AI and data science pipelines. Of the data and AI pipelines targeted with Spark RAPIDS, AT&T saves about half of their cloud computing spend and sees faster performance, while reducing their carbon footprint.

AT&T, which operates one of the largest field dispatch teams, is currently testing NVIDIA® cuOpt™ software to to handle more complex technician routing and optimization challenges. In early trials, cuOpt delivered solutions in 10 seconds, while the same computation on x86 CPUs took 1,000 seconds. The results yielded a 90 percent reduction in cloud costs and allowed technicians to complete more service calls each day.

Quantiphi, an innovative AI-first digital engineering company, is working with leading telcos to build custom LLMs to support field technicians​. Through LLM-powered virtual assistants acting as copilots, Quantiphi is helping field technicians resolve network-related issues and manage service tickets raised by end customers.