To move from a few agentic pilots to larger deployments, telcos must focus on developing a range of new technologies, which can be visualised as situated within an “agentic architecture”.
The architecture articulates the layers of technology and supporting processes required to build agentic systems:
Human: the architecture places the needs of users at the top of an agentic system to ensure focus on building trust and good user experience
Apps: apps interact with both humans and agents. These may be tools internal to the telco (e.g. CRM system) or external (e.g. customer or partner systems)
Agents: deployment of simple agent systems (which are controlled from the top of a hierarchy) and, over time, multi-agent systems (where agents obtain a degree of autonomy)
Intelligence: deployment of appropriate models to power agents and other tools
Knowledge: the federation and organising of knowledge to support model decision-making with suitable context
Data: the gathering, federation, transportation and use of data for training and use in the models
Compute and storage: supporting hardware, software and cloud resources
Operations layer: processes and technology that support the lifecycle of agents, models, knowledge and data. Security, privacy, governance, compliance and risk are also considerations here.
The top-level goals of each layer are:
