1 hour ago
Uniform standards, supportive regulatory policies and precise intent translation will be critical to building zero-touch telecom networks across India as infrastructure scales beyond human operational capacity, industry leaders said at the India Mobile Congress on Wednesday.
Speaking during a panel discussion on zero-touch networks, experts highlighted that autonomous networks offer significant gains in operational time efficiency, fault detection, expenditure reduction and overall customer experience while reducing manual dependence.
Addressing the sector's central role, U K Srivastava, president, regulatory policy at Reliance Jio, said, “If we consider today’s network, every sector depends on telecom.” “It will take quite some time before we close the loop completely,” he added.
Despite the numerous benefits of autonomous networks, panellists suggested that while artificial intelligence (AI) can carry out repetitive tasks, large and important tasks such as regulatory actions and monetisation should be done under human oversight.
“We are not talking about replacing people from an autonomous perspective, people will make high-level decisions—decisions in terms of governance and establishing rules. Autonomy will do the heavy lifting,” said Atul Joshi, head of telecom at AWS.
Apart from the various opportunities, panellists listed hurdles including a trust deficit and cybersecurity. Anurag Agarwal, co-founder and director of Databloc Technologies, said, “The question isn’t whether our machines will make mistakes—of course they will—but the real question is what we do after our autonomous machines make mistakes.”
“We need to put the right frameworks, the right guardrails around our autonomous networks as we move forward, so that not only we limit damage when anything goes wrong, but we also have the power to roll back those changes,” he added.
