Richard Thurston, TelecomTV (00:02):
We're here at the Ericsson OSS/BSS Summit in London, and with Jason Keane from Ericsson. Jason, great that you're spending time with us today.

Jason Keane, Ericsson (00:11):
Thank you for having me today.

Richard Thurston, TelecomTV (00:12):
So tell us about the challenges that you're helping customers solve.

Jason Keane, Ericsson (00:17):
Well, multiple challenges out there, but I think the theme of our event this year is talking a lot about how we can provide innovative, differentiated connectivity and part of enable that is for autonomous networks. Autonomous networks really is how we can do autonomous or automation and in which scale level that we can help our customers unlock the complexities and the overall, the cost of try to scale manually. We have a lot of dialogue around how autonomous operations and the transition state from where they are today to level 4, TM Forum level 4,TM Forum level 5, and what that path looks like.

Richard Thurston, TelecomTV (00:53):
Okay. So autonomous network has been a very big subject today. I mean, what should customers' areas of focus be?

Jason Keane, Ericsson (01:03):
We had it in so far in Summit, we're about halfway through the summit we had far in the summit is that where do we start? And what we say is we say that each kind of use case or each part of it - you don't get the whole network to autonomy day one. You start with your impactful use cases. One gentleman used in someone he calls the tyranny of use case. When you define use cases, we can be quite prescriptive versus actually bringing true value. But I think even now, given what it takes, you still have to prove there's a business value for what you're doing. Automation should bring through a benefit for the business. So use cases, the current tool we're using, what we're working with customers on is what use cases bring the biggest business impact for you and what's the return to do them. A lot of customers are exploring those around fault management and so forth to bring real value back to their business.

Richard Thurston, TelecomTV (01:51):
One of the other subjects which has been quite big today, AI and particularly agentic AI. How does that fit with OSS/BSS?

Jason Keane, Ericsson (02:00):
AI is a big subject every day, not only today, but what we see is when you really want to manage this at scale and you want to automate and move faster, you have to include artificial intelligence tools around it. There's different levels of AI. There is the machine learning pattern recognition, then there is of course LLMs, there's GPTs and then the agentic on top. Ultimately, what we see today, there's a level of maturity to get towards agentic and it was actually a very good line from one of the presenters this morning and analogist, he talked about building software. He said, for years we focused on building software. He said, now we need to focus on designing software and let the systems and the AI build it, the agentic AI build the software for you. I think that's exactly what we see there. How can we do a paradigm shift to thinking about and designing, not actually building. So that's kind of major push we see on the AI and agentic AI.

Richard Thurston, TelecomTV (02:51):
There's some really interesting conversations. Jason, thanks for joining us.

Jason Keane, Ericsson (02:55):
Thanks very much for having me.