The growing complexity of layered networks—from 2G to 6G—has made automation and cloud-native solutions critical for operators. Raghav Sahgal, President of Cloud and Network Services at Nokia, explains how automation, AI, and observability are enabling operators to manage networks more efficiently. In 2024, Nokia saw significant adoption of its solutions, including major deployments in core networks and private wireless, now serving 850+ customers.
Looking ahead, Sahgal envisions a shift toward level four autonomous networks over the next few years, where AI-driven automation will reduce human intervention. However, trust remains a key factor in adoption. Operators must balance evolving technology with responsible AI use to build confidence in automation.
Steve Saunders:
Raghav, what do you think is the number one challenge that your customers are facing? How is Nokia helping them address it?
Raghav Sahgal:
Well, automation is one of the key areas our customers are facing. We have layered 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G, 6G, and the complexity of the networks are growing and automation and cloud nativeness to be able to deliver the network capabilities is one of the key challenges that our customers are facing today.
Steve Saunders:
What's been the response from your customers, but also your ecosystem, your partners to your solutions in this area?
Raghav Sahgal:
Yeah, we've had a very strong response in 2024 from our customers. If you look at, just on the core side of things, the need for cloud nativeness, and we've had major, major deployments and customer swaps in 2024, so there's been a lot of response there. On private wireless, for example, we've got up to 850 customers now and growing at double-digit. If you look at on the API front, we are up to now 55 customers and partners, so that's accelerating in a big way, and there's a strong recognition of our capabilities and automation, which is bringing generative AI observability in agentic AI into the mix of things to be able to provide these capabilities.
Steve Saunders:
Automation, autonomous networks, we are hearing a lot about that. At what point do you think your customers are going to move to that level four autonomous networking environment where really the network can run itself without human beings getting involved?
Raghav Sahgal:
I think it's a journey. I mean, if you look at where the industry is today, it's somewhere a little bit greater than two. There are some that are higher and some that are trying to get there, and it's going to be a journey, but I think there's a strong desire to get there. And what you need for this is being able to bring in not only the generative AI and AI capabilities, but a lot of security and observability to be able to drive these large language action models and intent-based automation. And I think over the next two to three years, you will see the rise of this autonomous network framework being adopted more and more in the industry.
Steve Saunders:
Let's step back. What is the biggest hurdle to overcome with a tier one carrier who's thinking about deploying an autonomous network? Is it the technology or is it trust?
Raghav Sahgal:
I think it is kind of both. The technology needs to evolve, but also your ability to actually trust the capabilities of this automation that is being built and you want to make sure that you build it in a responsible way because you're using a lot of AI capabilities, generative AI capabilities. And so it is a notion of about technology evolution, but also building trust to be able to adopt it into the network.
Steve Saunders:
Well, I think Nokia has a pretty high level of trust with its customers, doesn't it?
Raghav Sahgal:
Yes, we do. I think we are leading the pack in this area, in the autonomous network framework. We've got customers now adopting many of the principles that we have built and capabilities that we have built, and we are seeing an acceleration in this. As I talked about in 2024, we just saw a great adoption and now we're starting to see more adoption going forward.