Ericsson has announced the integration of agentic AI into its NetCloud platform. This represents a major leap forward in enterprise 5G networking. In addition, as NetCloud evolves to effortlessly manage both Wireless WAN and private 5G solutions, Ericsson is also launching the industry’s first enterprise 5G agentic AI virtual expert. The virtual expert will transform how businesses deploy, optimize and manage their 5G networks.
“This particular story is using agentic AI to manage networks – simplifying the management of the network and its deployment, management and troubleshooting,” said Camille Campbell, Director of Wireless WAN and Security Product Marketing from Ericsson Enterprise Wireless Solutions. “We are a 5G company and are leveraging agentic AI for enterprise 5G, covering everything from the WAN edge to vehicles, all the way to industrial uses – manufacturing floors and warehouses for example. We believe that we are the first ones to focus on doing that, and that it represents a major leap forward in enterprise 5G networking.”
In addition, Ericcson is rolling out the industry’s first enterprise 5G agentic AI virtual expert
“Our virtual expert is embedded in our management system,” Campbell stated. “It’s about interacting with it to get questions, and you can ask queries of them. We are able to see all networks’ fault at any particular time and their performance at any time. Show me all the applications. So its really about trying to increase productivity for network and operations teams. It’s really about having a virtual expert that you can extract data from in a very intuitive and easy way.”
Campbell said that you train your virtual experts so that they are designed to be an expert in our solutions.
“We train them in such a way so they can become an expert themselves,” Campbell indicated. “Ours is designed to be an expert on cellular technologies. We actually do a lot of training and development on the AI so that it can be an expert in these technologies.”
The process is difficult, however.
“It depends on the scope,” Campbell said. “Many incorporate virtual network in their interfaces, but there are not many 5G experts who can do it. The agentic model has an organization that can implement those, but it’s not network management platforms, who compete with cellular vendors that we compete with day in and day out, and the enterprise 5G vendors. They haven’t made a lot of noise around AI. We want the first mover advantage in this space.”
Ericsson’s generative AI-based NetCloud Assistant (ANA) will advance from a user-prompt driven tool into a strategic partner empowered by a team of AI agents.
“If you look at Generative AI, it was a big deal last year because you could create new content,” Campbell said. “Agentic Ai is more powerful, intelligent, and it doesn’t have to be as prescriptive. You need to create a policy. The AI will figure out what it needs to do and steps it needs to take to achieve that objective.”
They also want to leverage it for 5G.
“ANA will be able to manage complex workflows, execute administrator decisions and learn in real time, reducing burdens for lean IT and Operational Technology (OT) teams while boosting network reliability and user experience,” Campbell said
“Generative AI was obviously a big thing last year, and a big deal with Generative AI was the ability to create new content. And it is user prompt driven, so you do have to ask the AI to do something, to be specific. And if I use a networking example, I might say, hey make a policy for me to keep this application available. Agentic AI is a faster and more powerful AI. Now I don’t have to be as prescriptive, and the Agentic AI will figure out what it needs to do and the steps it needs to take to achieve that objective. So its really considered that third wave of AI – predictive, generative and agentic.
ANA will be supported by multiple orchestrator and functional AI agents capable of planning and executing (with administrator direction). Orchestrator agents will be deployed in phases, starting with a troubleshooting agent planned in Q4 2025, followed by configuration, deployment, and policy agents planned in 2026. These orchestrators will connect with task, process, knowledge, and decision agents within an integrated agentic framework.
“We are definitely going to have multiple agents,” Campbell noted. “You have one overarching agent that sits at the top. Think of it as a CEO. That would be ANA. The troubleshooting orchestrator sits one level below that. Then you have task, process, decision and knowledge agents – four groups of agents But there is another level of agent, who perform some of the more basic tasks. You can think of it as this tiered hierarchy. But it functions more as a flat organization where agents are communicating with agents. I think they collaborate very nicely.
“We have worked very closely with our support organization,” Campbell added. “We work closely with our support organization and have worked out the top 10 areas why people call in. Then we walk through and mimic what technical support will do. With the top ten reasons why our customers call in to support, if any are problems, AI can flag that and ask the administrator if they want to start troubleshooting. Then it walks through a workflow that basically mimics what our support engineers would do. If they can’t, they gather logs that would go into technical support. If they have to call into support, they ensure the support engineer has all the details at their fingertips to more quickly remediate the issue.”
The other piece of what we are building into our products is AIOps.
“It is more about providing better network uptime,” Campbell said. “We’ve had it since 2023 but it was really only about our NetCloud SASE. What weve done is brought these capabilities out to our wireless WAN customers. So we’ve opened it up now to 37,000 that don’t have our SASE solution but do have our cellular routers and and adapters.
The other piece of the announcement is NetCloud.
“NetCloud has historically been our management platform,” Campbell stated. “We are in the process of integrating private 5G into that management system so that customers have one single pain of glass for the different forms of 5G. It also helps with the deployment for 5G because we do have a very simple UI, but very sophisticated as well. So the AIOps component is more about uptime and the virtual expert is more about productivity
“By introducing agentic AI into NetCloud, we’re enabling enterprises to simplify deployment and operations while also improving reliability, performance, and user experience,” said Pankaj Malhotra, Head of WWAN & Security, Ericsson Enterprise Wireless Solutions. “More importantly, it lays the foundation for our vision of fully autonomous, self-optimizing 5G enterprise networks that can power the next generation of enterprise innovation.”
ANA’s troubleshooting orchestrator will include automated workflows that address the top issues identified by Ericsson support teams, partners, and customers, such as offline devices and poor signal quality. Planned to launch in Q4 2025, this feature is expected to reduce downtime and customer support cases by over 20%.
In addition, ANA can now generate dynamic graphs to visually represent trends and complex query results involving multiple data points.
“ANA is also able to execute Explainable AI, where ANA displays real-time process feedback, revealing steps taken by AI agents in order to enhance transparency and trust,” Campbell said. ‘It is important because it builds trust in AI. All of our AI models are hosted within Ericcson
Expanded AIOps Insights come from NetCloud AIOps being expanded to provide isolation and correlation of fault, performance, configuration, and accounting anomalies for Wireless WAN and NetCloud SASE. For Ericsson Private 5G, NetCloud is expected to provide service health analytics including KPI monitoring and user equipment connectivity diagnostics. Planned availability for this is Q4 2025.
“With the integration of Ericsson Private 5G into the NetCloud platform, we’re taking a major step forward in making enterprise connectivity smarter, simpler, and adaptive,” stated Manish Tiwari, Head of Enterprise 5G, Ericsson Enterprise Wireless Solutions. “By building on powerful AI foundations, seamless lifecycle management, and the ability to scale securely across sites, we are providing flexibility to further accelerate digital transformation across industries. This is about more than connectivity: it is about giving enterprises the business-critical foundation they need to run IT and OT systems with confidence and unlock the next wave of innovation for their businesses.”
So what does all this do for channel partners?
“Channel partners fall under different categories,” Campbell said. “Having the AI benefit is a huge help because it pinpoints issues before something becomes service impacting. You have access to data quickly with the virtual expert. For partners who deliver a managed service, having the Ai capabilities is a huge help. You can offer a higher level to the customer by having AI.”