The telecom industry is undergoing a major transformation with AI-driven RAN at its core. Nokia is leading this shift, working with CSPs and industry partners like NVIDIA, SoftBank, and T-Mobile to integrate AI into network operations. The AI RAN Alliance, co-founded by Nokia, now has over 70 members, reflecting industry-wide adoption. AI-RAN is improving CSP operations by enabling smarter compute resource sharing, optimizing efficiency, and creating new monetization opportunities through platform-as-a-service (PaaS) business models.
By converging AI, RAN, and cloud, Nokia is paving the way for a new era in telecom, reducing costs, improving power consumption, and unlocking new revenue streams. This marks the industry's second major wireless transformation, adding intelligence to networks and opening new opportunities for CSPs.
Steve Saunders:
Aji, how is the industry embracing AI-RAN?
Aji Ed:
Yeah. See, AI-RAN is one of the hottest topic of the industry. And we have seen a dramatic shift in the industry over the last few years, not only just the CSPs, the operators are becoming more and more AI interested, but at the same time, AI companies are interested more into the telco segment. And Nokia has been working with the many of our partners and industry players and operators to really demonstrate what we can do with AI-RAN. And when AI-RAN Alliance was launched last year, 12 months ago, Nokia was one of the founding members.
Steve Saunders:
Mm-hmm.
Aji Ed:
And now, you can see there are 75 members in this alliance, which shows how the industry is embracing this technology.
Steve Saunders:
What are the key benefits of this technology?
Aji Ed:
Yeah. So, AI-RAN has the potential to offer multifold benefits, spanning across getting into the network efficiency, network performance improvements, or, if you look at the monetization benefit, creating a new revenue opportunities for the operators. And if you look at the multi-cloud infrastructure, that offers Edge artificial intelligence inferencing, which offers to the enterprises or other players to offer the AI capabilities.
Steve Saunders:
So, AI-RAN is focused on delivering better value for CSPs, but what does that value transformation mean for them in a business sense?
Aji Ed:
Yeah. See, if you look at the AI-RAN as the three different working groups perspective, because AI [inaudible 00:01:48], it's about network efficiency and performance. That means you get a better spectral efficiency for network and increase the automation, increase the autonomous operations, et cetera. That's one part of it. And the other part of it is, depending on the kind of use cases that you can build on top of Edge, so that multi-cloud infrastructure, we are working with T-Mobile, SoftBank, KDDI to explore all these different aspects of it, multi-cloud infrastructure, techno-economics, and how the network efficiency can be improved, how the power efficiency can be improved, and all of these are part of our exploration and the study that we are doing together as partners and operators.
Steve Saunders:
It's all really exciting, obviously. What's the biggest challenge for your customers in deploying AI-RAN, and how is Nokia helping them with that?
Aji Ed:
Yeah. So, of course, it comes with opportunities as well as challenges. Right? And I think that one of the most important aspects is about techno-economics. That means, how would it make sense to deploy infrastructure at the Edge, which is capable of AI workloads running, and at the same time, run workloads running. That means it is something which we need to evaluate based on where would it make sense, which part of the network, whether it is towards the cell site, towards the centralized data centers. So, this techno-economics needs to work, and correspondingly, the right solutions that we need to build to match with the techno-economics. So, this IAC does one of the challenges that we need to overcome over the next months, years, to really make it more successful.