Nokia detailed plans to open a network of what it termed Cognitive Collaboration Hubs, intended to drive cooperation between the vendor, operators and enterprises in the development of artificial intelligence (AI)-based services.

The Finnish vendor cited the example of driver behaviour analytics, which aims to improve road safety by providing real-time analysis of driver performance and road conditions. By hosting development on Nokia’s Ava cognitive services platform, the hubs will reduce operator time-to-market and increase return on investment in data analytics, it stated.

Nokia’s new data science centres are said to build on the success of Cloud Collaboration Hubs set up in 2018, which it said have “attracted substantial interest from operators to help them build new cloud-based capabilities”.

Agile development processes will be used to create use cases, test and put them into operation “within weeks”. Typical application areas focus on network operations, network performance, customer experience and data monetisation.

Unsurprisingly, 5G is also on the agenda, with Nokia stating it is “currently working with several US operators on the use of machine learning to improve 5G network planning, for example to help identify the best site locations or Massive MIMO beamforming configurations”.

Nokia also said operators have already benefitted from cognitive services created using these methodologies. It gave the example of a project with Turk Telecom, testing machine learning-based AI technologies on new-generation mobile and fixed platforms, using Nokia’s Mika AI assistant and Ava cognitive services platform.

The company did not state how many cognitive centres will be set up, or how they will be structured.