Charlotte Kan, TelecomTV (00:07):
Good morning everyone and welcome to our discussion titled Forging 5G's Future with AI and Automation. I'm Charlotte Kan and I am delighted to be moderating what will undoubtedly be a very insightful conversation. Now, before I introduce you to our distinguished speakers, some context for our conversation, we are at a key moment in the evolution of 5G networks as demand for high speed, low latency connectivity, surges, surges, network efficiency, scalability and resilience have become critical priorities for telecom operators. AI and automation are of course at the heart of this transformation. So today we are joined by leading experts in shaping the future of 5G with AI and automation. Let me introduce them to my left. Wang Quan vice President, deputy general manager of computing and core network products as ZTE, a key innovator of course in next generation network solutions, Honoré LaBourdette, bode vice president, telco ecosystem at Red Hat, a leader in open source platforms that power automation in telecom networks and Hans Bendik Jahren you are the vice president for network infrastructure and technical lead at the Telenor AI factory representing here of course a major global operator embracing AI driven efficiencies. So together we're going to explore how partnerships between technology providers and operators are driving efficiencies and scalable core network solutions. So let's dive into our first question to start with for all our guests and experts here, how does your partnership foster efficient core network solutions and scalability? Wang, would you like to start?

Wang Quan, ZTE (02:02):
I think the cornerstone or the foundation between ZTE and the Red Hat is based on the key keyword openness because operator, they really want openness their platform to build the qualification core network. In our combination with Red Hat solution actually we provide very open solution for the operators. That means Red Hat actually in this solution they provides the cloud platform which is OpenShift and the ZTE can provide the application such as native 5G code EPCS and we can also price the hardware and ZTE can also price the N two and integration for the operator. So that means the operator can choose this three level hardware cloud platform and application from different windows. So there will be no vendor locking and the efficient of the network will be very high. And with this solution actually we already built some big capacity, large capacity network in Malasia, Penland, Bangladesh and Mexico. And this solution really bring value and efficient to the customer.

Charlotte Kan, TelecomTV (03:33):
Thank you very much Honoré, how do you reflect on this partnership? And congratulations by the way. Thank you. On this MOU

Honoré LaBourdette, Red Hat (03:38):
So as I had mentioned in my opening comments, ZTE and Red Hat have been partners for many years now and the partnership is really anchored into very particular areas. One is in technology innovation and collaboration. The other is in the trusted partnership in how we work together to make our customers successful. Red Hat looks to ZTE to represent the customer needs and ZTE looks to Red Hat to bring the technology, the open source technology to drive that innovation in those solutions. We work very closely together in order to identify the challenges, the problems and most importantly to leverage the emerging technologies that Red Hat is taking to market combined with ZTE's skills and expertise with the customers to ensure that our telco customers can all be successful as they try to leverage this new technology. It's a really important relationship for both of us in how we work together and I think that that collaboration is key for the industry as well as key for our customers. We want to represent together what we can do best in order to ensure that our customers can succeed.

Charlotte Kan, TelecomTV (04:52):
I think that's a very valid point. It's not just about technology and solutions. What's at the heart of this transformation is collaboration indeed, hence ick. Your take on this partnerships and great collaborations.

Hans Bendik Jahren, Telenor (05:04):
I think from Telenor side and operator, it's important for us to have an than open networks and open solutions is the key so we can leverage the whole ecosystem. MAL not only operate the suppliers like Ziti but also other suppliers and then having Red Hat as the platform we can scale also to other partners to drive innovation and I think that's very much important for us and I think then jointly with Red Hat and Citi, the corporation across and having that transparency that we understand each other's objectives that we all like to drive innovation and how solutions that we can leverage on a big ecosystem, it's important to have jointly.

Charlotte Kan, TelecomTV (05:51):
Thank you very much. So we've talked about AI and automation for years now when it comes to the change transformation potential for the telecom sector of course, but with gen AI and all sorts of emerging techs accelerating the pace of change. I'd like you to maybe reflect now on how you see AI and automation reshaping the telecom sector and how in particular it will do it in terms of optimizing and enhancing 5G networks. Do you want to start?

Wang Quan, ZTE (06:20):
Okay. I think everybody now knows that AI is a game changer in all the industry including the telecom industry including the core network. Actually ZTE already introducing AI into all the core network. We do it in three aspects. The first one is AI plus networking architecture. The second one is AI plus communication service. The third one is AI plus network operation and maintenance. Especially I think the third one is very important because the network is become more and more complex and when we provide AI in the maintenance and operation, we do not only mean that we provide some automatic tools but also we are going to introduce some digital twin system to duplicate the real network to help to predict the data traffic in the network and to help to make a decision. So I always think that this digital system is like some weather system in the physical world we can use AI and the large model to do all the things to help the operator to do the automatic operation and maintenance.

Charlotte Kan, TelecomTV (08:01):
Thank you very much. Now, Honoré you have vast experience of course in industry and the tech sector overall based on what you've witnessed and the different ways of change you have seen over the years, tell us about what you picture now your vision for this AI and automation potential for the telco sector.

Honoré LaBourdette, Red Hat (08:21):
Yes. Well I agree that AI is going to be a game changer at Red Hat. We believe that AI will be the catalyst that's going to help reduce the complexity of software-defined infrastructure networks. Whether that's cloud native from the public cloud on-prem to the edge to the far edge as the industry moved toward, moved away from rigid proprietary hardware infrastructure platforms for telcos to deliver those services and we introduced rich open source software-defined infrastructure, we also introduced complexity and now AI will be the enabling technology that's going to help us minimize that complexity and also accelerate the path to new development and new innovation. Looking forward to things like reducing operational cost, improving operational efficiency, better understanding the health and the performance of the network. Really being able to analyze and assess exactly what our their customers need and what they anticipate. I think that there is a wealth of capability that will come with AI and we're very much looking forward to being a leader in the industry in how we deliver that with our partners like ZTE and to our telecommunication customers at Red Hat, we approach open source software with integrating and assimilating the capabilities into everything that we developed.

(10:01):
So very much like our approach to security, we have security embedded in every line of code that we developed with the open source community. We put back our open AI approach is going to be to embed the artificial intelligence into everything that we do from a software defined perspective so that all of the development community as well as our partners and customers can take advantage of it. Of course, we're also building platforms on which developers can develop their own AI capabilities. I do believe, I totally agree, it's going to be a game changer and I'm very much looking forward to see what kind of new things we're going to be doing together in the innovation lab with ZTE and with Telenor.

Charlotte Kan, TelecomTV (10:45):
So very exciting times ahead indeed. Now hence, what's your perspective as a telecom operator and are you as enthusiastic and excited as everyone about AI and automation?

Hans Bendik Jahren, Telenor (10:57):
Oh yeah, definitely. Telenor launched an corporation with NVIDIA last year as well. So we are definitely all in when it comes to AI and as a telco we always now put AI first in all. So that's the ambition. So definitely we're all in on the AI story. I would say from an operator perspective we definitely have probably furthest way to go on the people side. We have a lot of competence, upskilling, reskilling to really enable this. So I think that's the major shift in how we're actually going to approach this and definitely a big challenge which we are taking on when it comes to how we actually are driving it from a network operation point of view, I think we definitely already see a lot of agents, AI agents coming in on the radio optimization side. So I think we will have huge help in doing things much more granular. We will take all the optimization done so far on energy efficiency et cetera to the next level by looking more granularly into each of the networks where AI is helping us tremendously. So there will be lot of shift on competencies, we will have more data scientists than radio engineers with our work for our planning departments and so forth. That's definitely the major shift.

Charlotte Kan, TelecomTV (12:17):
Fantastic. So that's what the big picture, of course the vision. I'd like now to maybe dive into something a little bit more practical with you if possible. Wang, could you share maybe some practical AI applications, some use cases with us and maybe tell us what ZTE has developed for its 5G core networks and share those customer needs, customer stories, use cases with us please.

Wang Quan, ZTE (12:44):
Okay. I just mentioned there is a three aspects that ZTE is trying to introduce AI to integrate to the network. The first one is communication services. Actually we already try to deploy some new coding services into for example tenino groups network and actually with this services, this kind of services, we integrate AI into the traditional basic services such as the voice call, video call and the message. And I think with the capability of the AI integrated to the services, there will be a lot of innovation and there will be a lot of new services we can hope to have. The second one is networking. Networking. I think there will be two steps. The first one is we are going to already introduced some element smart elements like the NWDF into the network. The second, second step is I think all the network element will are become AI embedded and so the whole network will be changed from cloud native to AI native for the operation and the Menendez, I already mentioned that we are focusing on some digital twin system because in the core network sometimes the networking is very complex, even some minor failure in the core network where impact the whole network becomes some sling stone.

(14:33):
Yeah, we already heard some news that some large capacity network got failure for maybe 40 hours and that will be a disaster. And the cycling store is just like the weather system in the physical, it's complex but AI is very suitable to solve such problems to help the operator to predict the traffic trend and to manage the signal stone and make a decision, the strategy, how to deal with the significant. So I think the digital twin is a very good case for the operation and maintenance system.

Charlotte Kan, TelecomTV (15:17):
Thank you very much. That was very helpful indeed. Honoré earlier when I asked you about your vision for this AI automation transformation, you talked about the fact that you expect or you want AI to permeate basically all your activities, everything you do and to be at the heart of what you do and your very flexible open platform of course. So I was wondering if you could maybe expand on that a little bit and give us more examples and tell us how in very concrete terms you will integrate AI capabilities to support telecom operators in automation and

Honoré LaBourdette, Red Hat (15:52):
Well, needless to say, AI is going to be an integral part of the joint innovation lab that we're doing. We're anchoring a lot of the development work that we're doing around taking advantage of AI capabilities. I think that there's, for me, when I think about specific examples, it really is looking at the challenges that our customers are having in terms of what they're doing today. So challenges like if we think about cloud RAN or we think about open ran, there are challenges associated with how do you operationalize a disaggregated open ran network differently than the way that you would deploy or facilitate or operationalize a legacy RAN type of a deployment. And so I think one of the key use cases for AI is going to be to leverage that technology to better operationalize how we can actually rapidly deploy, manage, orchestrate, and then gather the intelligence back again as to the health of that network so that our customers can better serve their customers. So particular use case, again the operational efficiency I think is key. Rapid deployment of new services leveraging AI ran and cloud ran, as well as looking at the infrastructure and how can we leverage AI to provide the intelligence for better decision making around that actual infrastructure in the core.

Charlotte Kan, TelecomTV (17:17):
Fantastic, thank you very much. So a lot of excitement of course, but what about challenges for telecom operators? I think it would only be fair to have this conversation by attempting to talk about the potential blockers or what could stop you in your AI future to be very successful. Hence what's stopping at the moment or what key challenges do you foresee for telecom operators like you?

Hans Bendik Jahren, Telenor (17:44):
I would rather focus the top three, I would say competencies like I already mentioned, how to really get the skill people in there and also upskilling, reskilling, acquiring new competencies. That is one of the key challenges. The second is of course then data and how to get access to data, how to streamline that. There's of course pockets of opportunities where we can actually use the data, but more holistically access to the data will be more and more important. That is one of the hurdles we see. And the third one I will highlight is security. There is many issues related to data privacy, data access, how we use the data in the daily life, which is then definitely one of the bigger hurdles. I would say a bit wider than security, but it's also privacy, how we deal with the data. So that's one of the big things. And also looking to, I would say how other regulations coming are moving towards more sovereign use of data, et cetera, is also putting more challenges on how we actually can leverage the data we have accessible. Those would I say as the top three ones.

Charlotte Kan, TelecomTV (18:53):
Thank you very much. Thank you for sharing them very candidly with us. It's time to wrap up unfortunately, but before I let you go, I've got one more question for you is to maybe come up with one word that is key to deliver that fantastic 5G future through AI and automation. We've talked about collaboration, for instance, partnerships.

Hans Bendik Jahren, Telenor (19:14):
I think nurturing the openness and innovation is the key to actually deliver the best customer experience. Being open-minded and being collaborative in how we approach it. That's the key to be success.

Charlotte Kan, TelecomTV (19:26):
I think you've stolen Honoré's, keyword here. I was going

Honoré LaBourdette, Red Hat (19:28):
To say of course our one word is open, open source technology, open collaboration, open ecosystem, and innovation at the core of everything that we do in terms of how we approach open source and open source technology is innovation. So opens our key word, but I would add innovation for sure.

Charlotte Kan, TelecomTV (19:51):
Fantastic. Wang Quan, one word.

Wang Quan, ZTE (19:53):
Okay. I think I are, see from the network side, I think efficiency is very important and will help us increasing the efficiency very much so. The word for me is the efficiency.

Charlotte Kan, TelecomTV (20:10):
Okay, so efficiency, openness, collaborations. I think we've got the perfect recipe here. Really many thanks to all our guests. Please join me in standing a very warm thank you to all of them for their expertise. A great conversation on had to forge 5G's future with AI and automation. Thank you very much.