Blue Planet and Telefónica Deutschland (Telefónica Germany) completed a joint proof of concept (PoC) exploring the use of agentic AI to power 5G network slicing services.

The PoC integrated the former's OSS-native (operations support systems) agent builder platform Blue Planet AI Studio with the latter's multi-domain service orchestration (MDSO) environment, an instance provided by Blue Planet for the Telefónica arm since last year.

According to the two parties, tasks such as defining slice specifications and generating standards‑compliant service payloads – which require highly specialized expertise and manual effort – were "completed in minutes instead of weeks." By offloading complex standards to AI agents and reusing MDSO-managed catalog components, it was claimed the solution delivers faster, higher-quality designs, with guided, repeatable workflows ensuring absolute consistency while reducing error rates. With these results, Telefónica Germany bolsters its slicing stall against rivals such as Vodafone Germany, which last year launched 5G network slicing capabilities targeting small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and large organizations.

“Designing and delivering 5G network slicing services at scale is inherently complex and places significant demands on engineering teams,” said Eva Ulicevic, director of architecture, strategy, and technology enablement at Telefónica Deutschland. “[The PoC] is an important validation of how intent‑based, AI‑driven approaches can support our evolution toward more autonomous operations, allowing us to provide additional and enhanced customer services.”

“This proof of concept supports Telefónica’s ambition to advance towards higher levels of network autonomy, reinforcing the role of AI in transforming service and network operations. Moving beyond traditional automation requires evolving operational systems into AI-native platforms that can progressively increase autonomy,” said Javier García, head of core IT at Telefónica Global CTIO.

Viewed as one of the key architectural features of a 5G SA deployment, network slicing allows an operator to set up siloed virtual networks that act as independent, scalable networks, able to handle the extra traffic from resource-heavy use cases such as video streaming. While ABI Research has forecast network slicing to become a $19.5 billion market by 2028, current technical and use case issues have slowed down the market in recent years, with 2018 seeing ABI originally proclaim it as a $66 billion market opportunity by 2026.

The increasing use of AI agents in telecom may bring the opportunity closer to home. In an interview with SDxCentral marking the tenth anniversary of its acquisition by Ciena, Joe Cumello, senior vice president and general manager of Blue Planet, said the concept of autonomous networks and agentic AI has already enabled "massive increases in efficiency and agility that we've been hoping for over the last sort of decade or so."

“A few years back, you couldn't really get AI and agentic going really well if you hadn't had the first step in the first place,” Cumello said. “And then you have the cloud players in the background, the advancements that they've been making, and also Kubernetes developments in the background on being able to format data and put applications in the cloud. All these things are stepping stones to get us to the point we are at today.”