BARCELONA – Both Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud were tapped by Nokia for network slice innovations showcased at this year’s Mobile World Congress (MWC) event.

As recently covered by SDxCentral, the Swedish giant paired with AWS on agentic AI-powered 5G-Advanced network slicing in a live 5G network, with early users including Orange and Emirati carrier Du.

Giving a close up look at MWC, Mika Uusitalo, head of new technologies and innovations for Nokia, explained the agents were made using Amazon Bedrock and interact with the AWS cloud to manage slicing operations with little to no human involvement.

With a map based on Google Earth and open-sourced event data, agents can spot real-time network flareups based on events and accidents and divert network coverage where needed. Uusitalo said this can also extend to spotting events that aren’t disclosed online via social media, such as illegal raves, by spotting traffic spikes resulting from large congregations.

The Nokia head also pointed to revenue opportunities around events for communication service providers (CSPs), while even suggesting a potential opportunity around emergency services.

“Operators can sell this as a service [to events], or sponsor the events and so forth. And we can also give the host the slice one hour before an event as boosting for VIP users in attendance. So we get information from the internet and we combine that information and give it over to our slicing," Uusitalo said. “This could also be used by an operator’s network operation center (NOC) for a 911-style service, with the agent seeing there's an emergency in a particular location, and then it connects to the operator's network and boosts the coverage.”

“Nobody else has this, this is a world first,” Uusitalo claimed.

Google and kinetic tokens

Away from AWS, Nokia also partnered with Google Cloud in an expansion of its Network-as-Code (NaC) telecom API ecosystem. Google Cloud’s agentic AI capacities will be embedded into NaC with no-code integration to help operators maximize 5G investments as well as shifting telecom away from network APIs associated with the likes of Vonage toward smarter, more programmable networks.

Among the Google agents highlighted by the Finnish giant is one capable of requesting a dedicated network slice to assist multimodal AI inference from mobile device feeds, guaranteeing bandwidth availability precisely at the start of data transmission.

“Agentic AI has personally caught me by surprise," Shkumbin Hamiti, VP and head of network monetization platform for core software at Nokia, explained. "I openly say that one year ago, we did not have it on our roadmaps. Then later on, we were quite surprised at how quickly agentic AI is being used by various digital creators out there. So we thought, okay, we should actually enable AI agents to utilize network APIs to do their job.”

The VP stressed to SDxCentral that security remains paramount with the expansion, adding: “We as an industry have to work in creating the kinds of guardrails so that these agents don't go and do their own stuff, and actually a nice way to do that is by limiting access to certain network APIs in the beginning.

"As an example, it's not a big deal if a network agent starts asking too many times to verify APIs, but it is a problem if those agents start asking high quality-of-services questions randomly and generating charges for the user. And there we have to just put some guardrails as part of the design," Hamiti added. "But, I think as an industry, we still have a lot of certification types that we need to do for AI agents to truly open up commercially.”

Nokia’s NaC ecosystem includes more than 75 partners, with the likes of Deutsche Telekom, with whom Nokia expanded its AI radio access network (RAN) ventures with at MWC this week, alongside Orange, Rakuten, and Vodafone.

The deal also deepens the hyperscale footprint in all things telecom, with recent AWS deals showcased by both Ericsson and Nokia in recent months.

Google got another look in at MWC, with Ericsson trialing a 1 Tb/s 5G core network running entirely on Google Cloud.

Recent hypercaler focus from the vendor giants seems more tied to the AI gains available from the cloud giants, according to comments by Hamiti, who saw the Google tie-up as part of the natural evolution for telecom toward AI-driven value creation and value capture. The VP specifically remarked on what Deutsche Telekom dubs "kinetic tokens," operational tokens that control the real-world movement of AI-driven and 6G-based machines such as robots and drones.

“The telco world will actually serve physical AI, and physical AI will be using tokens, which are not informational delivery or retrieval, but rather an actionable token," Hamiti said. "It’s an idea which resonates really well with me.”