The Awards recognise outstanding innovation in automation and the use of AI to change how networks function and operate, writes Contributing Editor Annie Turner.

The FutureNet World Awards 2025 were the crowning glory at our hugely successful in-person event in London in May. Our congratulations and thanks to all the winners and entrants for their outstanding contributions. A special thank you goes to our independent judging panel which, as ever, had the unenviable task of choosing winners from an outstanding field.

Read the stories behind the FutureNet World Awards winners.

The AIOps Award

This award is given for the best operations solution from a vendor which incorporates AI functionality. The winner is Nokia Data Suite which is designed to expedite business insights and enable AI at scale. According to Analysys Mason, inconsistent and inaccessible data reduce AI’s effectiveness, and access to quality data is one of the biggest obstructions to scaling AI.

The Nokia suite offers pre-correlated data packages for 4G, 5G and fixed networks to overcome inconsistencies in multi-vendor environments, ensuring uniformity and reliability. The suite’s ready-to-use data products enable communications service providers (CSPs) to build their own AI use cases or to leverage Nokia’s library of more than 100 telco analytics use cases.

Nokia Data Suite has been deployed by a Tier 1 operator in the US to manage a national network, stitching together multi-vendor data from 250,000 cells. It processes 270,000 reports per second to enhance the operator’s data and AI usage and also reduced the cost of maintaining several mediation applications for multiple vendors. It is the cornerstone of the operator’s MLOps programme, empowering engineers, data scientists and project managers.

The suite has also been deployed by one of the largest operator groups in Europe providing a single, scalable MLOps platform across several countries on the continent with more than 30 AI use cases in production. These use cases have improved network performance, reduced downtime and enhanced customers’ satisfaction.

“Winning the FutureNet World Award in the AIOps category underscores our commitment to excellence in autonomous networks,” said Henrietta Katajakoski, AI and Analytics Marketing Manager, Cloud and Network Services – Nokia.

“This recognition validates our efforts in leveraging AI and automation to deliver measurable impact for CSPs worldwide. It’s not just an achievement for our team but also reflects how we are shaping telecom’s future with solutions like Nokia Data Suite.”  

Automation Solution Award

This is given to the best network automation solution from a vendor and was awarded to Rakuten Site Manager. It a low-code/no-code platform designed to accelerate time-to-market by automating the network lifecycle. This ranges from radio frequency planning to site maintenance, streamlining workflows – it provides customisable orchestration templates based on the BPMN 2.0 standard – and reducing manual effort.

The platform is bringing efficiency to telecom operators such as AT&T in the US, 1&1 in Germany and Rakuten Mobile in Japan by transforming operations into data-driven processes, end to end. The platform enables real-time monitoring, task evaluation and collaboration, leading to cost savings, improved performance and faster issue resolution. Japan’s Rakuten Mobile was able to retire more than 10 legacy tools.

Overall, the platform helps reduce costs and operational expenditures by up to 40%. Key performance metrics show that Rakuten Site Manager has delivered a 94% shorter time-to-market for new features, a 3x reduction in site acceptance time and integration with more than 25 external systems.

The solution is instrumental in designing and managing over 1,000 data centres across various regions, creating more than 4.5 million sites and processing more than 23 million work orders. Furthermore, it has enabled customers to streamline auto-commissioning processes, implement zero-touch provisioning, and optimise resource utilisation.

The solution’s app is compatible with any mobile device and plays a critical role in managing and reporting site build activities. Key features include a centralised knowledge base, while real-time tracking streamlines workflows, improves planning and ensures uninterrupted operations, even in remote areas. Mobile work orders, integrated maps and geo-tagging can improve coordination and decision-making.

Additionally, the platform’s capabilities span diverse use cases, from planning charging networks for electric vehicles to managing power grids and data centre planning.

“The FutureNet World brings the most engaged and sharpest minds to the most important space in the modern telecom business – full business transformation from running on people and paper to running on software and data, using AI.” said Vivek Murthy, President, OSS Business Unit at Rakuten Symphony.

“This award reflects our commitment to excellence in automation. We look forward to leveraging AI, enabling faster, error-free operations and self-healing services.”

Autonomous Network Operations Award

The Huawei ADN Level 4 Solution for Agent-centric O&M Experience won this Award, for the best example of large-scale automation and intelligent operations from a vendor. Huawei is the first vendor to receive the Autonomous Network Operations Award, reflecting the growing momentum of Autonomous Networks (AN) in the communications industry.

This agent-centric solution is designed to help CSPs achieve Autonomous Networks Level 4 by optimising their operations and maintenance (O&M) capabilities. It does this by targeting high-value scenarios in network maintenance, experience optimisation and service operations. The solution has the Mate-series copilots for four roles and the Spirit-series agents for seven scenarios.

The Huawei ADN Level 4 Solution for Agent-centric O&M Experience has been deployed worldwide, delivering positive results across IP, core, optical and wireless networks.

In his keynote speech at FutureNet World in London, in May, Sam Wang, General Manager of Huawei ADN Solution, said that Huawei will double down on high-value scenarios, drive device-native innovation and extend the leadership of ADN Level 4 solution. He added that as well as helping CSPs raise their AN level, it will also boost their commercial success in the 5G-A era, laying a solid foundation for the advent of 6G.

Customer Experience Award

This award for the vendor with the most innovative application of AI to enhance customer experience was won for AURA, an AI-driven call intelligence solution. It detects hidden IVR patterns, understands customers’ complaints and correlates issues with real-time network data.

AURA comprises attributes of Altice Labs’ Assurance system, NOSSIS Assurance, and the lab’s Conversational AI platform, BOTSchool. NOSSIS Assurance runs automated diagnostics end-to-end to verify customers’ service quality and network conditions. When multiple customers report similar issues, NOSSIS Assurance correlates inventory, network diagnostics, alarms and performance metrics to generate new insights that pinpoint the issue.

BOTSchool listens, analyses IVR interactions and automatically classifies calls and groups of similar complaints, identifying patterns that human agents might miss.

By combining NOSSIS Assurance’s real-time diagnostics with BOTSchool’s complaint classification, the AURA AI-Agent detects problems faster and AURA accelerates issue resolution by structuring insights from IVR interactions while NOSSIS Assurance verifies real-time network conditions.

Business benefits include a 25% decrease in the average time to detect service issues and an18% fall in call centre traffic during early-stage incidents due to proactive detection and outbound customer notifications.

AURA provides 30% faster root-cause identification, reducing dependency on manual CRM reviews and accelerating time-to-resolution.

These improvements positively impact Net Promoter Score (NPS) as faster detection and notifications to customer reduce waiting times and frustration during service disruptions. There is also better first-call resolution from automating the classification and routing of complaints, leading to shorter call durations and less work for agents.

AURA solves a long-standing telecom industry problem, bridging the gap between customers’ views and network intelligence, transforming call centres into data-driven support hubs.

Network AI Award

This award recognises the most innovative AI solution to enhance network performance from a vendor and goes to Amdocs amAIz Network Agents.

Metrics from live projects show that the agents’ alarms prediction covers more than 90% of major and critical service-impacting alarms, up to 50 hours before an issue is likely to manifest. Root-case analysis by the machine learning has led to a 46% reduction in actual alarms.

The solution has achieved a 63% reduction in average handling time and 30% better accuracy inferencing specific to telco, and cut inference latency by up to an 80%. It reduces downtime/mean time to repair by up to 40%. Use of advanced inventory and simulation capabilities lead to superior service quality, including dramatic increase in automated incident resolution.

amAIz Network Agents combines Amdocs’ patented algorithms for AI and machine learning, plus GenAI and agentic AI, to analyse large volumes of real-time and historical data. The agents are designed and trained to handle specific tasks, making it simpler and faster to deploy and train them.

The Network Deployment Agent leverages Amdocs’ proven Network Analytics and Optimization platform in combination with NVIDIA Aerial Omniverse Digital Twin.

The Network Operations Agent draw on Amdocs’ award-winning Intelligent Networking Suite in combination with NVIDIA NeMo and NIM microservices integrated with Amazon SageMaker to speed the deployment of autonomous network operations. The agent uses AWS’ data analytics ecosystem, including the telco data lake on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) on top of knowledge bases using AWS’ purpose-built databases.

“Winning the Network AI Award at FutureNet World for the second year running is a strong endorsement of our leadership in AI-driven OSS. This year’s recognition highlights the power of our Intelligent Networking Suite and the innovation behind our amAIz Network Agents – enabling smarter planning, faster issue resolution and superior customer experiences. It’s a proud moment that reflects our commitment to shaping the future of autonomous networks,” commented Sarit Assaf, General Manager, Amdocs Technology.

Network Sustainability Award

This award is for the best intelligent automation solution for network sustainability and energy efficiency from a vendor. This year’s winner is Ericsson’s 5G Advanced Automated Energy Saver.

Network sustainability and energy efficiency are business critical. GSMA’s report, Telco AI: State of the Market (Q2-2024), found that energy accounts for 45% of network opex and 15–20% of an operator’s total operational expenditure.

A Tier 1 operator trialled Automated Energy Saver across six radio nodes, dynamically adjusting New Radio (NR) Massive MIMO’s (M-MIMO) sleep conditions based on real-time traffic demands, ensuring that 90% of users experienced at least 70 Mbps downlink throughput.

This resulted is energy savings of up 6.8% in addition to NR M-MIMO’s Sleep mechanisms and a 30% increase in radio sleep time. Automated, AI-powered adjustments eliminate manual configurations, simplifying operations. This intent-driven automation streamlined energy management in the radio access network (RAN), lowering total cost of ownership while delivering uninterrupted, high-performance connectivity.

Autonomous Energy Saver played a key role in enabling a scalable and cost-effective 5G network for another Tier 1 operator, enabling it to balance energy saving and user experience across multiple sites. Unlike static energy-saving features, Ericsson’s intent-driven solution dynamically defines and maintains a minimum user experience threshold per site.

This led to energy savings at some sites of up to 7.4%, with an average reduction of 4.8% across the deployment. Energy consumption was managed throughout the day to maximise savings without disrupting service quality. On average, the 5G Advanced Automated Energy Saver solution saved 1.531 kWh per site during the activation period, significantly reducing network operating costs.

Johan Hultell, Head of Product Line Cloud & Purpose-built 5G RAN at Ericsson, says, “This award strongly endorses our commitment to innovation, driving both sustainability and customer value. Our 5G Advanced Automated Energy Saver (AES) solution has shown remarkable success in improving energy efficiency while maintaining user experience. We are excited to bring such real-time intent-driven automation capabilities to market, helping service providers build more sustainable and future-ready networks.”

Operator Deployment Award

TELUS and P.I. Works won this award for the best example of a successful automation deployment for operators or jointly by operators and vendors.

They automated 32 RAN use cases nationwide to manage traditional and Open RAN elements on a single, unified platform. The automated closed loops improve energy consumption through AI-enabled prediction (compared with vendors’ own energy saving features) and mitigate the impact of outages on customers through autonomous healing actions. This automation comes into play during outages as well as in the deployment of new Open RAN sites.

The deployment involved P.I. Works and TELUS integrating several vendors’ solutions across 4G and 5G networks, without disrupting service. It has significantly improved network performance, operations and customer experience leveraging predictive AI and ML algorithms at the same time as providing substantial savings and agility.

The solution also automates network management, improving how multi-vendor mobile networks are run and also upgraded. For example, there were tangible increases in network performance, network accessibility, mobility and throughput in hotspots. There were also decreases in service interruptions and energy consumption in the RAN.

Importantly, improvements in network performance and better service continuity translate into higher customer satisfaction without additional investment.

Overall, the case study exemplifies the shift towards open and disaggregated networks, showcasing improved operational efficiency, despite networks becoming increasingly complex, and progress towards TELUS’ target of 100% compliance with OpenRAN by the end of 2029.

“We are proud to have been a strategic partner for TELUS in delivering robust AI-driven automation across their mobile network. The Operator Deployment Award highlights the tangible impact of intelligent automation in transforming mobile networks and achieving operational excellence. This recognition demonstrates how our solutions empower our customers to enhance network performance, reduce operational complexity, and deliver exceptional customer experiences that matter most” comments Levent Tanyel, Account Director, North Americas, P.I. Works

Operator Award for Network API

This goes to Telenor for the best example of API use case(s) and monetisation by an operator or jointly by an operators and vendor. Telenor Research & Innovation set out to develop a partner ecosystem to address strengthen 5G’s uptake and monetisation through APIs, AI and automation. The result is a joint innovation to deliver customer-centric, private 5G experiences in the B2B market, demonstrated in a near-commercial, large-scale test environment in Norway with 12 ecosystem partners (Airbus, Airolit, Cumucore, Druid Software, Emblasoft, ENEA, i2i Systems, Intel, Nokia, Oracle Communications, Oslo University, Red Hat).

A portfolio of private 5G networks is essential for tailor-made services, and the five specialised use cases in this pilot only represent a fraction of the value propositions that private 5G networks could generate for industries. The goal is to encourage more enterprises to explore business opportunities harnessing 5G technologies.

APIs are central to this pilot—from enabling systems integration to create a unified private 5G platform, to exposing network capabilities such as quality-on-demand to customers. AI and automation abstract 5G’s complexities from customers, while improving operational efficiencies and reducing costs to for operators.

An AI-powered customer portal simplifies users’ interactions. It translatess customers’ needs, written in natural language, into specific technical service orders. The portal supports TM Forum’s TMF921 API for intent management, allowing intents to be expressed and negotiated.

For network slicing-based private 5G networks, a full-stack orchestration framework automates the actual service deployment, leveraging ETSI SOL005, REST, and Kubernetes APIs. Testing tools are also used to monitor networks’ and applications’ behaviour and performance. For mobile and portable private 5G networks, Open APIs are used to automate service activation.

“Winning is always more meaningful when it reflects our commitment to putting customers first, and achieved with partners. This project is a testament to Telenor’s focus on customer-centric innovation and the advancement of 5G capabilities. By harnessing AI, APIs and automation, we’re simplifying 5G service ordering, making it easier for customers to adopt and access specialised networks. This approach is key to delivering seamless, tailored connectivity aligned with our customers’ evolving needs”, stated Cathal Kennedy, Acting Group CTO at Telenor.

Orchestration Award

This award recognises the most innovative automated service orchestration solution and was presented to Netcracker and e& UAE. Netcracker’s E2E Service Orchestration solution (E2ESO) has redefined orchestration as a strategic enabler in e& UAE’s network delivering measurable outcomes in operational efficiency, time to deliver and customer experience.

e& UAE (formerly Etisalat) has been modernising and automating networking domains to gain more agility and optimise costs. Netcracker has been a partner for several domains including the core, SD-WAN, enterprise customer premises (CPE) equipment and fibre access.

However, the operator was struggling to bring cross-domain services to market in a competitive way. Product launches took more than a year, which was inhibiting growth in the B2B market and stifling innovation.

e& UAE chose Netcracker’s E2ESO, with its intent-processing, cloud-based architecture and DevOps delivery approach, to overcome these issues. With Netcracker E2ESO, e& UAE has:

• Reduced average service delivery time from 30 days to just 5, significantly enhancing customer responsiveness
• Reduced product launches from over 12 months to 12 weeks resulting in significant cost savings
• Empowered its customers with visibility and control through a self-service interface – enabling them to place orders, track service progress, and modify service parameters.

Netcracker’s E2ESO minimises e& UAE’s dependency on specific network technologies by exposing TM Forum Open APIs, for more flexibility and to mitigate operational risk.

Ari Banerjee, Chief Strategy Officer at Netcracker says, “Netcracker is delighted and honoured to be recognised for this important award with e& UAE. In the fast paced digital landscape, E2E Service Orchestration plays a vital role in bringing automation and agility across complex network domains. Our orchestration solution and strong partnership has helped e& UAE deliver impressive results and we are building off this success to help more CSPs advance towards autonomous networks.”

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