AI STRATEGY
“ The journey we started years ago with AI continues,” says Azfar.“ Every time I engage with customers I challenge them: have you thought about operationalising this? Have you thought about what’ s the impact and the benefit of these things? Why are you choosing these use cases? Start with the questions and you get to the right journey. It’ s also helped Nokia. We build networks for AI and to carry our workloads from data centres to the wide area networks. We also build a lot of AI into our own products. My challenge to our teams is always the same: what’ s the real impact?”
Driving innovation at Nokia Nokia and Bell Labs have a history of pioneering innovation in AI. As well as developing AI solutions specifically for networking products that improve customer experience and usability, the business has worked on Gen AI models, solutions to improve energy efficiency and network performance, and chatbots specifically for the telecom industry. Most recently, it announced its work with an ecosystem of industry partners to develop AI-powered Radio Access Networks that will transform future network operations.
Irrespective of application, the company advocates for responsible and trusted AI that delivers sustainable enterprise and industrial applications. Azfar points to the company’ s six pillars of responsible AI – fairness; reliability, safety and security; privacy; transparency; sustainability; and accountability – as being crucial for development.
“ Transparency and accountability are particularly important, considering many of the industries we work with and in are so heavily regulated,” he says.“ We’ re running entire economies and societies on the digital fabric of data centres and networks – you can’ t compromise reliability or private data in any way. We play with new technologies and innovate, but we always factor failsafe mechanisms into everything we work with.
50 July 2025