• Ericsson has long provided OSS and BSS tools to its mobile network infrastructure customers
• But traditional OSS and BSS systems aren’t going to cut it in the AI era
• The Swedish vendor, with help from AWS, has given its core products an AI makeover and developed a range of next-gen applications that operators are already adopting

COPENHAGEN – DTW Ignite 2025 – Ericsson has rocked into this year’s DTW Ignite event, the annual gathering for the telco software community, with a revamped OSS and BSS portfolio for the AI-native telco era: Its pitch is focused on telco top and bottom lines, features support from hyperscaler Amazon Web Services (AWS), and includes some customer references that give credence to its claims. 

The new portfolio pitch is wide-ranging and requires time, focus and a double espresso (minimum, not decaf) to unravel. The big picture view is that Ericsson has realised its OSS and BSS tools need to address the requirements of network operators that either already, or will in the near future, adopt cloud-native processes, run cloud-based horizontal IT platforms and make extensive use of AI to automate back-office processes and introduce autonomous network operations that reduce manual intervention and the time to address problems while also introducing greater agility (as long as the right foundations are in place). You can read Ericsson’s pitch about its new OSS and BSS portfolio in this press release.     

And the vendor has taken things further. To accompany the revamp it has – in partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS), with which it has been working on the evolution of its OSS/BSS portfolio for some time – developed what it calls a Gen-AI Lab to help telcos more quickly adopt and realise the benefits of generative AI (GenAI). For the full details, see this announcement. 

Grameenphone, the largest mobile operator in Bangladesh and part of the Telenor group, is the first CSP to use the Gen-AI Lab to create an agentic AI-powered tool that has been designed to automate the usually manual process of migration from its legacy product catalogue to Ericsson Catalog Manager. Grameenphone’s chief product officer (CPO), Solaiman Alam, stated:  “Grameenphone’s participation in the Ericsson and AWS Gen-AI Lab marks a key milestone in our innovation journey. This proof of concept explores how advanced AI can automate processes and enable faster, more contextual product development. While still early, the initiative reflects our commitment to shaping telecom’s future through intelligent technologies and strong partnerships that accelerate Bangladesh’s digital transformation and unlocks new possibilities with AI.” 

In addition, Ericsson and AWS have developed what the vendor calls its Telco Agentic AI Studio, a platform aimed at developers that are creating tailored GenAI tools for telecom network operators. 

As you might expect, Ericsson has got the ball rolling by developing more than 20 cloud-native AI and GenAI applications that meet a range of telco needs, including a product configuration assistant, a network insights assistant and a configure, price, quote (CPQ) assistant that the vendor calls Guided Selling. 

These developments are supported by a Telco IT AI Engine that is designed to “handle operations, orchestration and coordination of AI tasks and processes, security and ethical considerations, and managing data storage and retrieval efficiently,” all of which sounds tricky.

The move is noteworthy because so many mobile operators use Ericsson software because of their radio access network infrastructure relationship with the giant Swedish vendor, which claims to have more than 300 telecom operator customer relationships around the world. 

Jason Keane, who heads up Ericsson’s OSS and BSS portfolio, is conscious that the announcements might look like just more AI noise and hype. “The whole industry is culpable of overhyping AI – you can’t get away from talk about GenAI and agentic AI these days,” he noted in a conversation with TelecomTV on the DTW show floor (as it was still being built). “The reality is that our customers are under pressure” to cut costs and generate greater revenues, and Keane says he had that in mind when the revamp began. “There’s a lot of talk about AI – it’s a good tool – but it has to have an impact” on meaningful operational and financial metrics, he added.

The mantra with AI – and it’s no different in the telecom sector – is that the success of any AI deployment and/or automation strategy is built on the foundations of relevant and accurate data. 

“Telcos have no shortage of data, but useful data is hard to come by,” said Keane. He noted that Ericsson’s mediation system, which at some operators handles billions of call data records (CDRs) each day, is used by more than 290 telcos and proven to be a reliable data management platform. This mediation system has been re-engineered with APIs that enable a “pipeline” to large language models (LLMs) and given the new name of Telco DataOps Platform, so that the data can be handled, processed and used in the way that best suits the needs of the operator. The initial LLM pipeline is to AWS’s Bedrock, which in turn provides access to multiple foundational models from the likes of Anthropic, as well as AWS itself. Keane says the Telco DataOps Platform is LLM agnostic and has also been tested with Google and Mistral AI, but that AWS Bedrock is the initial key partner.

He also notes that adopting the Telco DataOps Platform doesn’t change things overnight for a telco: The benefits will take time as the telco data needs to be trained and tuned using the LLM, he explained. But once the data is tuned, the resulting functions “can be intent-based; they can be agentic AI applications, he added. 

In this case, Orange is a reference case as, following a trial at Orange Belgium late last year, it is deploying the vendor’s upgraded Service Orchestration and Assurance solution to “automate the creation of advanced 5G services for enterprises and subscribers across its European affiliates… The intent-based design capabilities of the solution simplifies the creation and replication of new 5G and network slicing use cases, such as mobile private network, CellLock or Geofencing service for the enterprise market, or fixed wireless access service for the consumer market.” 

Orange is deploying the Ericsson solution on its telco cloud platform, which is underpinned by the Sylva open-source telco cloud platform. 

“This partnership with Ericsson is an important step in our journey towards cloud native and demand-centric, autonomous networks,” noted Laurent Leboucher, group chief technology officer at Orange. “Ericsson’s service orchestration solution will run above our horizontal Orange telco cloud infrastructure and will enable our 5G networks to deliver a differentiated experience to our business and retail customers,” he added. 

- Ray Le Maistre, Editorial Director, TelecomTV