Nokia and Microsoft build agentic data foundation for network automation
Nokia has extended its partnership with Microsoft to build what the two companies describe as an agentic, unified data foundation for telecommunications operators. The collaboration integrates Nokia Data Suite, which provides prebuilt telco data products with semantic modelling and data-quality controls, with Microsoft Fabric's unified analytics platform, OneLake storage and AI-native tooling including Power BI and Microsoft 365 Copilot.
The stated goal is to compress the time required to prepare and operationalise network data from several weeks to minutes, removing what both companies identify as a persistent bottleneck to scaling AI in live operator environments. The solution is available now and is designed to operate across multi-vendor, cross-domain environments, supporting hybrid and cloud deployments as well as on-premises infrastructure.
Initial use cases
Nokia and Microsoft have published three initial go-to-market use cases. The first is autonomous VoNR (voice over new radio) assurance, in which AI agents detect service anomalies, conduct root-cause analysis and recommend remediation steps using what the companies describe as 360-degree observability across network, service and subscriber data.
The second is geo-experience, which uses machine learning to map RAN subscriber sessions to precise geographic locations, correlating subscriber, network and radio-frequency data to identify degraded coverage and capacity hotspots. Agents surface root-cause recommendations for both standard 4G/5G traffic and network-sliced traffic. The third is predictive maintenance and fault management, where agents analyse historical and real-time data to anticipate faults before they affect end-users. The two companies say AI operational assistants throughout these workflows act as copilots for network engineers rather than replacing human oversight entirely.
Vivek Jaiswal, Senior Vice President for Autonomous Networks at Nokia, said the integration is intended to help networks "evolve from static infrastructures into programmable, AI-native platforms." Silvia Candiani, Corporate Vice President for Worldwide Telco and Media at Microsoft, said operators needed "trusted data, strong governance and platforms that can scale" before moving AI from experimentation into day-to-day operations.
Market and competitive context
The drive to automate network operations is accelerating as operators seek to offset rising energy and labour costs while meeting service-level obligations on 5G and, eventually, 6G infrastructure. The TM Forum's autonomous networks framework, widely referenced across the industry, sets out a maturity progression from manually assisted to fully autonomous operation; most large operators are currently at levels two to three of that six-level scale, making the data-integration layer a genuine commercial differentiator.
Nokia competes in this space with Ericsson, which has its own AI-native network management portfolio, and with a number of specialist network-analytics vendors. Microsoft Fabric, meanwhile, is positioned against Databricks and Snowflake in the broader enterprise data-platform market, and the telco vertical is one of several where Microsoft has been actively building industry-specific data products and governance tooling.
The solution's cross-domain design and explicit support for on-premises and hybrid deployments are notable given the data-residency and sovereignty requirements that several European and Asian operators face under national regulatory frameworks. The EU's NIS2 directive and, for operators handling voice and messaging data, GDPR both impose constraints on where subscriber-level data can be processed, and the glass-box transparency controls built into Nokia Data Suite appear designed in part to address auditability obligations under those frameworks.
Nokia has not disclosed commercial deal terms, named a launch operator customer, or published independent benchmark figures for the data-provisioning speed claims. Investors and buyers will be watching for named deployments and independently verified performance data as the partnership moves into broader rollout.