Nokia has unveiled aApps, a series of lightweight, specialized software modules built to help telecom operators manage their networks with minimal human input.

Detailed in a company blog post, aApps are “localized agentic, autonomous applications” designed to handle tasks such as rerouting traffic during congestion or isolating hardware failures, and automatically spring into action when needed.

By cutting the human out of routine operational decisions, Nokia touts its aApps as a way for operator networks to respond faster, making them more reliable and cheaper to operate.

Jitin Bhandari, CTO and VP of the cloud and Network Services (CNS) business group at Nokia, said: “The dawn of autonomous networks is upon us, driven by the convergence with 5G, 5G Advanced, and AI.

“As a next step, we must leverage AI- and cloud-native-based automation to create self-aware, self-healing, and self-optimizing networks.”

The current concept dominating the AI hype cycle is AI agents, or agentic AI – the idea that an AI-based system can automate a specific task or application, without the need for human intervention.

Networks have seen a growing number of agentic offerings emerge of late, with both Extreme Networks and Articul8 having released vertical-specific offerings in the past month alone.

Nokia, too, has been getting in on the wave of AI-powered network automation offerings, teaming up with Google Cloud last month to unveil Autonomous Networks Fabric, a suite of AI models, tools, and apps designed to power network automation.

Its latest offering, however, zeroes in on localized autonomy, embedding intelligence directly at the edge of the network.

Each aApp is built to make decisions across a specific domain in real-time, such as rerouting data, scaling up capacity, or isolating security threats, without waiting on centralized systems or human input.

The bottom-up approach with aApps differs from traditional automation frameworks, which often rely on orchestration layers or cloud-based controllers. Instead, Nokia’s new software offerings operate closer to the action, which the vendor contends makes them faster, more responsive, and potentially more resilient at managing faults or outages.

“As these technologies mature, we can expect to see a dramatic transformation in the telecom landscape, with networks becoming more intelligent, adaptable, and efficient, ultimately delivering a better experience for users,” Bhandari added.

Earlier this month, Nokia opened up its network API services to Google Cloud users through its marketplace platform, widening access to offerings like its Quality of Service on Demand, Number Verification, and Device Location Verification APIs.

The Finnish firm also widened its partnership with Broadcom’s VMware to integrate the latter’s cloud-based network functions into the former’s latest Telco Cloud Platform (TCP) – allowing Nokia to validate its network functions to work on the latest VMware platform.