MWC25: Nokia Pushes for Autonomous Network Transformation
Having grown its business substantially over the past 12 months, Nokia is now focusing even more on autonomous networks, cloud adoption and AI.
This is as the telecommunications industry enters what company CTO Jitin Bhandari calls “the 2.0 era of 5G”.
In an exclusive interview at Mobile World Congress 2025, Jitin Bandari, Chief Technology Officer for Cloud and Network Services at Nokia, outlined how Nokia is currently responding to industry challenges and opportunities.
“We are in a very interesting juncture here. Clearly we have come a long way when it comes to maturity in the cloud,” he says. “That option of cloud and hybrid cloud is definitely a relevant thing. AI is emerging fast.”
Nokia continues to position itself at the intersection of cloud technology, with AI and network automation continuing to experience significant growth across the telecommunications sector.
“We are talking quite a bit about automation and autonomous networks operations, which is picking up a lot of steam this time around,” Jitin adds. “We have seen traditional ecosystems of AI from machine learning (ML) ops or ML aspects, but now with the transformer models, conversational aspects of AI into the network are being talked about quite a bit.”
Delivering hybrid solutions
A central theme of Nokia's presence at MWC Barcelona 2025 is helping telecommunications companies navigate the complexities of hybrid cloud environments, which have presented unique challenges for the sector.
“How do you use cloud tools in a hybrid context? I mean that's the most relevant for telcos,” Jitin explains. “You’ve got to be on-prem and cloud, so we’re looking at how we can make toll sets use these technologies in a more impactful way.”
As a telco leader, Nokia has established itself as an innovator in cloud technologies for telecommunications for some time and has always led when it comes to cloud-focused topics. Now, Jitin explains the company is looking to help its customers accelerate the journey of 5G Standalone (5G SA) adoption.
“This is where the cloud is really accelerating, especially around the core of the network,” he shares. “A lot of software methodologies are being adopted, so that is a good acceleration. We are finally now seeing our service provider friends adopting an autonomous networks framework.”
The importance of network programmability
Beyond cloud and AI, Nokia has reported significant progress in its network programmability across global markets.
With such developments worldwide, Nokia is eager to prioritise its strategic partnerships to form a stronger ecosystem around telecommunications providers.
“Networks play a very critical role to leverage the benefits of cloud and AI.”
“We've got now 50-plus service providers out in the world who are accelerating the programmability concepts, including the GSMA on One API frameworks,” Jitin notes.
“We have also announced quite a lot of partnerships specifically focused on AI. We are seeing quite a bit of momentum both on the traditional pieces, such as how we solve data challenges in networks, as well as how we harness the power of transformer models in generative AI (Gen AI).”
Jitin explains that these essential collaborations will serve a critical function within the telecommunications landscape as it transforms.
“Networks play a very critical role to leverage the benefits of cloud and AI. If you want to see the maximum benefit, it's all about the ecosystem and partnerships,” he says. “You need to have that ecosystem of applications which can harness data and actually build up applications that leverage this AI context.”
Such a collaborative approach will extend to programmability efforts as well, with Nokia eager to make its use cases more relevant for key industries around the world.
“The ecosystem becomes critical,” Jitin says. “If you want to cross that bridge of B2B and B2C for more use cases, one has to focus on that.”
He adds: “It's all about going beyond the technology challenges. How do you make yourself ready for B2B transformation? A large part of it needs to be making mobile networks and conversion networks more relevant for industries and enterprises.”
Telco transformation: Looking beyond technology
When it comes to thinking about how the telecommunications industry will look moving forward, Nokia understands that the technology needs to be relevant to a company’s business model.
How Nokia tackles this challenge is by working closely with customers to develop scaled business use cases before even applying the technology.
“If you start thinking from that perspective and start thinking about scaled business use cases and then apply technologies like cloud, AI and quantum, you'll probably get better business outcomes,” Jitin says.
“The true benefit of cloud agility needs to be understood both from an infrastructure play and from an autonomous operations play. Autonomous decision-making and autonomous networks paradigms need to be implemented both from top-down and bottom-up.”
Data management presents another significant consideration for telecommunications companies. “When it comes to AI, there are two pieces to it. One is around the data and how you harness complex data structures,” Jitin says.
“Now we are talking about both structured and unstructured data. It’s about how you build up data practises within telcos because we do see real time and non-real time data.”
“I see more of a sense of urgency with autonomous networks.”
Looking at Nokia’s exciting announcements at MWC, including the development of an Open Telecom AI Platform with AMD, Cisco and Jio Platforms and its AI-RAN transformations, the telco is prioritising automation to open new possibilities.
“I see more of a sense of urgency with autonomous networks, which is very good because tools like cloud and AI help us go back to the basics of how to build automation,” Jitin says.
“Having that focus on autonomous networks and autonomous operations will carve our way to creating more revenue-generating opportunities towards B2B.”
He adds: “Automation is foundational. I'm very excited this year and hopefully we'll see some execution at scale around those topics and the industry will turn around by next year.”
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