Telia wants AI agents to take on more software development

Telia wants AI agents to handle more of its software development and automate parts of mobile network operations, according to CIO Hein Müskens, who spoke at Google Cloud AI Day in Stockholm in late October.

The company has 4,000 developers in five countries. Its goal is to automate the process from business requirements to production software, with people supervising the results. Telia’s internal platform, Telia.ai, includes two data stores: one in its own infrastructure and one in the public cloud. Müskens said the company also operates its own large language model gateways and keeps much of its work on its own infrastructure, partly because some customers do not want their data shared or moved elsewhere.

Telia already makes more than 5,000 network changes each day, including traffic optimization and equipment configuration. It also uses automation to analyze faults, link alerts and create service cases. Müskens said the company wants to apply newer AI capabilities to continue improving network performance. He described autonomous network operations as necessary as networks become harder to manage manually.

Telia is also investing with Brookfield in AI infrastructure in Sweden, with plans for an AI data center to handle sensitive workloads for large business customers. Müskens said the initiative could create new revenue and complement Telia’s connectivity services. He described AI agents handling the full software development process as a major internal project, but the source excerpt ends before giving further details about current usage.