Ronan Casey

Our Telco API Won’t Work with AI Agents Telcos are racing to expose their networks through APIs. CAMARA, Open Gateway, and TM Forum’s ODA aim to standardize access to functions like SIM provisioning, number verification, and QoS configuration. But the way modern software interacts with systems has already moved on. We’ve seen this pattern before. In 2015, telcos committed to network function virtualization. But by 2017, AWS had already scaled containerized workloads, and the rest of the tech industry had shifted to Kubernetes, microservices, and automated CI/CD pipelines. While telcos were debugging OpenStack and building VNF managers, the core architecture of digital services had evolved. We eventually adopted cloud-native, just in time for that stack to become legacy. We seems to be always one step behind... Now the new software architecture is agentic. Systems are no longer just exposing endpoints. They are exposing reasoning. Language models now operate with memory, context windows, dynamic tool use, and planning. Frameworks like LangChain, CrewAI, and Devin let agents compose multi-step tasks, calling dozens of tools across different domains, without predefined flows. This isn’t theoretical. Agents today routinely orchestrate across 50 to 100 services autonomously. REST APIs don’t support that. They were built for deterministic transactions, not adaptive delegation. This is why technologies like Model Context Protocol (MCP) are emerging. Introduced by Anthropic in 2024, MCP defines how models interact with external systems: retrieving tools, invoking functions, fetching live data, and coordinating workflows, all through a unified, model-readable schema. In under a year, OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft have aligned their agent runtimes with MCP-style patterns. It is becoming the TCP/IP layer for the AI-native stack. I raised this six months ago. In that time, @Claude’s context window expanded to 200,000 tokens. GPT-5 is rumored to exceed one million. Open-source models like GPT‑OSS‑20B now run inference on consumer GPUs. The model scale, reasoning depth, and tool complexity have all exploded. Telco progress in six month on Agent protocols? Nearly zero. Without a presence at the context layer, our networks are invisible. Latency, edge location, mobility, none of it matters if agents don’t perceive or reason about these constraints. APIs are yesterday’s integration model. If telcos are not part of the model’s planning loop, we’ll miss the AI-native compute layer completely. If you want more behind-the-scenes confessions from the industry, subscribe to my newsletter: https://lnkd.in/gWRwRTix

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𝐉𝐢𝐨 𝐏𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐬’ 𝐞𝐱𝐜𝐥𝐮𝐬𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐧𝐞𝐰𝐬𝐥𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫, 𝐟𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐢𝐧𝐬𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭𝐬 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐆𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐧𝐞𝐫®. Drawing from the Gartner 𝘌𝘮𝘦𝘳𝘨𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘛𝘦𝘤𝘩 𝘐𝘮𝘱𝘢𝘤𝘵 𝘙𝘢𝘥𝘢𝘳: 𝘊𝘚𝘗 𝘛𝘦𝘤𝘩𝘯𝘰𝘭𝘰𝘨𝘪𝘦𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘚𝘦𝘳𝘷𝘪𝘤𝘦𝘴 report, the newsletter explores: ✓ How JPL’s 5G SA Core enables future-ready, AI-powered networks ✓ The long-term value of investing in intelligent and scalable infrastructure ✓ How JPL’s 5G and AI portfolio supports next-gen CSP transformation ✓ Evolving enterprise and cloud demands that CSPs must prepare for Here’s a quick preview of how our end-to-end stack aligns with Gartner recommendations. Want JPL’s detailed perspective along with the complete Gartner report? 𝐀𝐜𝐜𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐈𝐭 𝐍𝐨𝐰: https://lnkd.in/djRFPw58 #5G #5GCN #6G #AI #software #innovation #technology

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Network APIs Going Mainstream in 2025 🚀 2025: The Year Network APIs Go Mainstream As we head into 2025, network APIs are set to become a fundamental driver of 5G monetization and digital transformation. 📡 From enhancing financial security with real-time fraud detection to enabling mission-critical services with Quality on Demand, the possibilities are endless. In his latest byline, Mikko Jarva, CTO of Nokia's Network Monetization Platform, explores how CSPs and developers can unlock new revenue streams and tap into the full potential of 5G. 👉 https://lnkd.in/e95eAvtd #5G #NetworkAPIs #TelecomInnovation #DigitalTransformation #NetworkasCode #TelcoAPI

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The first telco engineers are retiring. And nobody will replace them. (That's the generation that brought us GSM). A chapter that started 30 years ago will be closed forever. I still remember waiting until 10pm to call from a payphone (it was cheaper then). And my first mobile phone? An Alcatel One Touch, still somewhere in a drawer. That generation wrote the entire telco playbook. And now we ask: What happens when they leave? It’s tempting to think about replacements, but that’s not quite right. Because today’s engineers won’t step into the same roles. Not with AI already reshaping the way we work. The next wave of telecom talent will inherit the same mission of connectivity, but not the same jobs. They'll have AI agents so the way the work will be totally new. Even more than their expertise, I'm worried we risk losing the wisdom of a generation that built connectivity from scratch. ↘ Will AI Agents be the key to retain knowledge from older generation?

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