Telefónica and Nokia have teamed to explore the use of agentic AI to enable open, interoperable telecom network APIs.

This partnership is focuseed on testing two emerging AI protocols – agent-to-agent protocol (A2A) to enable multiple AI agents to coordinate complex workflows by discovering, communicating, and collaborating dynamically; and model context protocol (MCP) to standardize how AI systems access external tools and data consistently and securely.

“By combining AI protocols with Nokia’s network exposure and Network-as-Code platforms, we enable secure, consistent access to network capabilities and let AI agents coordinate complex workflows, end to end," Shkumbin Hamiti, head of network monetization platform at Nokia, noted in a statement. “The result is an actionable, developer‑friendly experience that moves our industry one step closer to an agent‑driven monetization ecosystem."

Testing a bank fraud prevention agent

As part of its first development, Telefónica and Nokia tested a bank fraud prevention agent in a laboratory environment. In this case, Telefonica’s testbed used an MCP server provided by Nokia’s Network Exposure Platform to expose network APIs and other resources that benefit the bank fraud prevention application, such as SIM swap and device swap.

Nokia’s Network-as-Code platform is used to aggregate these Telefónica capabilities for simplified exposure to the application developers of the bank in an A2A format.

The partners have pledged to share insights from this initiative with the broader industry to foster standardization and help accelerate ecosystem growth.

The maturing of the cloud market has opened new opportunities in the telecom ecosystem, with operators hoping that they can use APIs to sell additional services to their customers, and potentially create new revenue streams with new use cases. Network vendors also see an opportunity to help these carriers capitalize on this platform.

Despite some challenges, the network API market is forecast to unlock up to $300 billion in connectivity and edge computing-related revenue for operators over the next six years, according to McKinsey.