Ericsson Infuses Agentic AI Into NetCloud To Simplify Private 5G Adoption
The company tells CRN that Ericsson is the first 5G vendor to build agentic AI directly into its centralized wireless and private cellular management platform.
Ericsson Enterprise Wireless is injecting agentic AI into its flagship NetCloud wireless and cellular management platform.
The company told CRN the addition marks a major leap forward in enterprise 5G networking, and that Ericsson is the first 5G vendor to build agentic AI directly into its centralized management platform.
“The whole purpose is around creating more value for our partners as they’re out there selling and deploying solutions for their customers,” said Camille Campbell, director of product marketing at Ericsson Enterprise Wireless solutions. “If you think about benefits this agentic AI feature in conjunction with some of the other AI functionality, [like] AIOps insights, for example, it’s really about making it easier for partners to deploy and manage our wireless WAN portfolio, as well as coming very, very soon, our private 5G portfolio.”
The NetCloud platform, which allows enterprises and channel partners to manage their LTE wireless WAN and in Q4, private 5G environments from the cloud, came to Ericsson as part of its $1.1 billion Cradlepoint purchase in 2020. Part of the NetCloud platform is a virtual assistant called ANA — AI-Based NetCloud Assistant — a generative AI-powered tool developed by Ericsson and introduced in January.
Specifically, Ericsson is adding agentic AI into ANA, which will take its virtual assistant’s capabilities to the “next level,” said Campbell (pictured above). That’s because agentic AI gives users access to AI agents that can execute tasks based on the administrators’ desire or intention, she said.
“The big deal about agentic is I can say: ‘Hey, my point of sale traffic is the most important traffic in my network. I need it to be 100 percent available.’ And the agentic AI will say: ‘We’ll look at your network configuration, maybe recommend tweaks to the configuration [and] recommend policies to implement to keep that traffic available.’ You have intent. It can execute on your intent,” she said.
ANA will have multiple orchestrator and functional AI agents that are capable of planning and executing based on administrator direction. The company said that orchestrator agents will be deployed in phases, starting with a troubleshooting agent planned in Q4 2025, followed by configuration, deployment, and policy agents planned for 2026.
ANA’s troubleshooting orchestrator will include automated workflows that address the top issues identified by Ericsson support teams, partners, and customers, including offline devices and poor signal quality, Ericsson said.
For enterprises and partners managing on behalf of their clients, ANA will display real-time process feedback that show steps taken by AI agents, the company said.
Private 5G integration into NetCloud, which is coming in Q4 2025, according to Ericsson, will simplify the deployment and management of private cellular for enterprises, said. It’s part of the reason that the company is doubling down on baking AI into NetCloud, she said.
“The whole intent is that our partners can deploy at scale. They can deploy a network with better uptime. They can do it [while] reducing some of their support costs, and at the same time, speeding uptime service for their customers,” she said.
Ericsson is seeing “massive” growth rates for private 5G adoption right now. AI will help these businesses, or MSPs, do more faster and take on a more proactive approach to managing the network, Campbell said.
“If you look where AI really started, it was within the Wi-Fi world and moved into traditional networking and security, but it still really is an emerging technology in the 5G world,” she said. “Nobody can argue with the transformative impacts that AI is having and this announcement is really just trying to stay at the forefront of AI innovation and bringing that into our products and technologies.”