Verizon is using agentic AI to improve network automation and says the agents are already handling some operational tasks with promising results.
The carrier says its automation stack sits on the on-premises Verizon Cloud Platform, which hosts virtual and cloud-native network functions. That platform runs Verizon’s 5G standalone core and virtualized radio access network, and it also houses GPUs for on-premises network AI workloads.
Verizon’s vRAN scale gives the project room
In early 2025, Verizon said it had 22,900 vRAN sites in service and that 40% of its network was running on its vRAN platform. Umashankar Velusamy, Verizon’s senior director of technology development for network automation, outlined the setup at Network X Americas last month.
Velusamy split RAN automation into planned changes, unplanned changes and optimizations. He said vRAN deployments are completely automated once the hardware is installed and connected at the far edge, and Verizon can automatically upgrade thousands of sites at a time.
Where the agents fit
Velusamy said agentic solutions are well suited to generating and validating configurations for new deployments and large upgrades. He also said AI agents can correlate data from multiple sources to help resolve network problems faster, and that autonomous agents can monitor the network, identify optimization opportunities, turn them into actions, execute those actions and verify the results.
What this means for network-ops teams
For operators and vendors selling into automation stacks, Verizon is setting a high bar around transparency, security and integration. Velusamy said the carrier wants suppliers to improve transparency and integration for agentic operations, and he said it would benefit from a common interoperability framework covering security, trust, handoffs, negotiation and context sharing.
He also said carriers need to keep flexibility and work independently because the AI ecosystem is moving much faster than telecom standards. Omdia analyst Gabriel Brown said Verizon has built the world’s largest 5G vRAN network and is among the global leaders in network cloud automation, and he said agents should extend both the speed and depth of automation.