Delivering Nokia Enhanced AIOps with the Right Foundations

Bruce Wallis pivoted the discussion to Nokia’s AIOps capabilities, centered on a new natural language interface called Ask EDA. This feature, which resembles a ChatGPT for the network, allows operators to interact with the EDA platform through a simple chat box. The core idea is to abstract the complexity of network operations, enabling users to ask plain-English questions, such as “list my SRL interfaces” or “is BFD enabled?”, and receive back live, structured data, tables, and even on-the-fly visualizations like pie charts and line graphs. This approach removes the need for operators to understand the complex underlying Yang models or schemas for each vendor, as the AI handles the translation from human language to machine query.

The right foundation for this capability, as Wallis explained, is not a single, monolithic, trained model, but a flexible agentic AI framework. In this model, the central LLM acts as a brain that coordinates a set of pluggable agents, or tools, each with a specific function. The most powerful aspect of this design is its real-time extensibility. Wallis demonstrated this by first showing the AI failing to understand a request to “enable the locator LED.” He then installed a new support application from EDA’s App Store; when asked again, the AI agent immediately recognized and used this new tool to successfully execute the command. This app-based approach allows Nokia to add new troubleshooting workflows and capabilities on the fly, without retraining the model or upgrading the core platform.

This agentic framework is applied directly to troubleshooting and operations. Wallis showed how “Ask EDA” can be used to investigate “deviations,” or configuration drift, where the running config no longer matches the intended state. In another example, with a BGP peer alarm active, the AI was asked to investigate. It used its agents to query various resources, analyze the topology, and correctly identified that the BGP manager process had crashed and restarted, providing a direct link to the deviation. Wallis emphasized that this method of using the LLM to query factual data from live telemetry and tools is how Nokia is addressing the problem of hallucinations, ensuring the AI’s answers are grounded in reality.