Cambridge Research: Vendor Progress in Delivering Agentic Systems

Charlotte Patrick

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KEY TAKEAWAYS

  • Service assurance is a strong starting point for agentic AI, but vendors are moving cautiously, and some are relabelling existing machine learning and rules-based tools as agents.

  • Building a reliable assurance agent workforce takes action across the whole operator: trusted knowledge, solid connections to operational systems, and the right controls.

  • Cambridge AIQ’s review of 13 vendors identified four distinct strategies, running from trusted assurance data source providers to full-stack agentic OSS ecosystems and operator-wide agentic AI frameworks.

  • Operators need to choose the vendor approach that best fits their wider vision for agentic AI, because the strategies differ sharply on knowledge planes, agent portfolios, and digital twin maturity.

2 MIN READ


This is a short article based on one of the technical reports produced by Cambridge AIQ, the research and analysis arm of Cambridge Management Consulting. To find out more and to purchase any of reports, click here.

Vendor Progress in Delivering Agentic Systems

Cambridge AIQ has recently completed a competitive landscape of 13 vendors providing AI and agentic systems for service assurance. 


During our research we found:


  • A cautious market: Service assurance is a good starting point for agentic AI, but vendors are moving carefully. Some are relabelling existing machine learning and rules-based capabilities as agents; reflecting both the immaturity of the technologies involved and the difficulty of making agents work reliably in live operations

  • Challenges beyond assurance: Creating a reliable workforce of assurance agents requires action to be taken across the operator: How can agents access reliable knowledge, how to connect them successfully to operational systems, and what controls need to be put in place?

  • Different vendor strategies: Vendors are taking markedly different approaches. Operators need to decide which fits their wider vision for agentic AI.


Four main vendor strategies were found:


The first category is the trusted assurance data source providers: These are assurance specialists seeking to protect their role as key providers of network data by adding agentic AI interfaces. They aim to provide trustworthy, high-quality data supported by many years of experience in normalisation and federation. In addition, they have traditionally built semantic understanding into their applications, but as agentic AI starts to require development of a knowledge plane, they are the least likely of the four categories to consider developing their own knowledge assets (e.g. knowledge graphs). They also have fewer agents already developed than other categories, and we may see them provide one or more data agents that operator- or vendor-owned agents providing assurance capabilities such as root-cause analysis can query.


Agentic AI assurance framework providers are assurance specialists that we see comprehensively re-engineering their solutions for agentic AI. Only two vendors are in this category: Infovista and Vitria, each taking a different approach. Vitria’s agents operate in a streaming, real-time AIOps pipeline, with a knowledge plane serving as the agents' grounding. While Infovista offers an extensive portfolio of agents that help customers retrieve the right data for their purposes, it does not currently offer a full knowledge plane.


The second category are Agentic OSS ecosystem providers: They have a full OSS portfolio (including inventory and orchestration) and are tightly integrating agentic AI to become the full-stack autonomy architecture for network operations. They are more likely to adopt a “data + knowledge” strategy, adding to their comprehensive data assets by building an equally comprehensive set of knowledge assets. In general, these vendors tend to have more sophisticated product sets, with more agents and more mature digital twin implementations. Some also offer AgentOps and development capabilities; some do not.


The final category are the Agentic AI framework for operator providers: They have a broad telecoms portfolio across network domains, including BSS and/or network functions, cloud platforms, and security. They wish to provide a common agentic AI framework and accompanying professional services that leverage their operator expertise. We interviewed Amdocs in this category, which sees agentic AI as central to the company’s future. It offers multiple agents, a knowledge plane with digital twin, a common logical data model across operational and analytical domains, a full governance, security and observability framework, and an SDK.

The Full Report is Available Now


Our new report, Competitive Landscape: Agentic AI for Assurance, provides:


  • An overview of the state of agentic AI in the service assurance market
  • An analysis of vendor approaches to the key technology layers (e.g. models, knowledge, data etc.) that support agentic AI
  • A profile of each of the 13 major vendors interviewed for the report
  • A comprehensive discussion of the critical success factors operators need to consider when applying agentic AI to service assurance in the service layer and network assurance in specific network resource domains.


To find out more or to purchase the report, click here.

About Us

Cambridge Management Consulting (Cambridge MC) is an international consulting firm that helps companies of all sizes have a better impact on the world. Founded in Cambridge, UK, initially to help the start-up community, Cambridge MC has grown to over 200 consultants working on projects in 25 countries. Our capabilities focus on supporting the private and public sector with their people, process and digital technology challenges.


What makes Cambridge Management Consulting unique is that it doesn’t employ consultants – only senior executives with real industry or government experience and the skills to advise their clients from a place of true credibility. Our team strives to have a highly positive impact on all the organisations they serve. We are confident there is no business or enterprise that we cannot help transform for the better.


Cambridge Management Consulting has offices or legal entities in Cambridge, London, New York, Paris, Dubai, Singapore and Helsinki, with further expansion planned in future. 

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