Ericsson will help telecommunications companies make their operations more efficient through a new AI collaboration with Amazon Web Services.

Stockholm-based Ericsson started out as a telegraph repair shop in the second half of the nineteenth century. Today, it’s one of the world’s largest suppliers of network equipment with more than €20 billion in annual revenue. Internet providers rely on Ericsson hardware to provide 5G connectivity. Other companies, such as manufacturers, use the firm’s technology to build private wireless networks in their facilities. Those private networks allow industrial robots and other high-tech machines to share data with one another.

Alongside network equipment, Ericsson sells software for powering that equipment. It also provides professional services that help customers set up and use its products. According to the firm, its newly announced partnership with AWS will bolster the lineup of professional services that it offers to telecommunications companies.

Ericsson and the cloud giant are launching a joint program they call the Gen-AI Lab. It’s designed to help telecommunications companies implement AI in their OSS/BSS infrastructure. OSS/BSS is an umbrella term for two software product categories that focus on two different sets of use cases. 

OSS, which is short for operations support systems, refers to the software that internet providers use to manage their network infrastructure. The technology eases tasks such as planning the placement of new cell towers and troubleshooting technical issues. BSS, meanwhile, stands for business support systems. Those are the software tools that a telco uses to manage business tasks such as billing customers and running marketing campaigns.

According to Ericsson, the Gen-AI Lab program that it has launched with AWS is designed to help telecommunications companies streamline the activities they carry out in OSS/BSS applications. The two tech giants will accomplish that using Amazon Bedrock. This is an AWS service that provides access to cloud-hosted large language models and other neural networks.

“As part of the Lab, experts from both companies will support a customer to work through challenges, and devise answers,” an Ericsson spokesperson told Boardroom Insight. “Ericsson’s OSS/BSS and AWS customers can engage with us to experiment safely with Gen-AI, leveraging Ericsson OSS/BSS software and AWS AI platforms. We jointly assess and qualify the idea, and experiment to transform that idea into an AI-driven application.”

Ericsson already offered a collection of OSS/BSS-focused professional services prior to the new collaboration with AWS. Those services help clients with tasks such as setting up the Swedish firm’s OSS/BSS software in their IT environments. According to Ericsson, the new Gen-AI Lab is designed to complement those existing consulting offerings. 

“The new GenAI Lab is separate and in addition to the existing OSS/BSS services offered by Ericsson which span Advise, Build, Operate and Ensure, along with a holistic end-to-end approach with Ericsson Intelligent IT Suite,” the Ericsson spokesperson explained. The Ericsson Intelligent IT Suite is a bundle of professional services designed to help telcos modernize their OSS/BSS software. It focuses on use cases such as integrating OSS/BSS tools with a company’s other software systems. 

Ericsson’s partnership with AWS also extends beyond professional services. Alongside Gen-AI Lab, it’s rolling out a software development toolkit dubbed the Telco Agentic AI Studio. It uses Bedrock to help developers build AI-powered applications for the telecommunications sector.

Photo courtesy of Ericsson