Building AI That Works: ESnet's Pragmatic Approach to AI-Driven Operational Excellence

Cloud network infrastructure at hyperscale presents unique operational challenges where traditional human-driven incident response cannot keep pace with the volume, velocity, and complexity of failures. This paper presents an agentic AI architecture for autonomous incident resolution in large-scale network operations. Our system employs a multi-agent orchestration framework where specialized AI agents collaborate to detect, diagnose, and remediate network incidents without human intervention. We describe the architectural principles, including hierarchical agent decomposition, skills-based tool invocation via standardized protocols, structured knowledge encoding from operational runbooks, progressive autonomy with safety boundaries, and closed-loop verification. The architecture has been deployed in production at a major cloud provider, demonstrating that agentic AI systems can achieve autonomous resolution rates exceeding 90% for common incident categories while maintaining safety guarantees through layered authorization and rollback mechanisms. We discuss design tradeoffs, failure modes, and lessons learned from operating autonomous AI agents at scale.

Telecommunication networks are increasingly complex due to heterogeneous technologies, diverse service requirements, and growing demands for resource efficiency and business agility. Intent-Based Networking (IBN) and, more recently, agentic AI have emerged as promising paradigms to address this complexity through autonomous network management. However, existing approaches primarily focus on operational orchestration within Operations Support Systems (OSS) and lack an integrated framework that spans Business Support Systems (BSS) and OSS, limiting the realisation of true intent-to-business-to-network coordination. This paper presents a role-based multi-agent architecture (MAS) for end-to-end intent orchestration that mirrors Communication Service Provider (CSP) organisational structures. The proposed framework applies principles of functional decomposition, explicit task ownership, privacy-preserving domain separation, and domain-specific expertise within a hierarchical four-layer agent system spanning customer engagement, strategic planning, service delivery, and infrastructure provisioning. Leadership agents coordinate planning activities, whilst specialised service and resource agents are dynamically instantiated according to intent requirements. A proof-of-concept implementation demonstrates the feasibility of bridging the BSS-OSS divide through structured agent coordination, illustrating how agentic MAS can support accountable and scalable intent-driven service orchestration.

Large language models are increasingly being used to support network operations (NetOps) and artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps), including incident investigation, root-cause analysis, configuration synthesis, and limited self-healing. In both NetOps and AIOps, this shift is changing how tasks are managed. Agent-based operations work as workflows, from gathering evidence to taking action, following permissions, policies, and checks, and providing rollback options when necessary. This is crucial because operational decisions can have instant impacts. To make the argument concrete, we organise the relevant literature around the hierarchy of autonomy, tool scope, evidence traces, and assurance contracts. These contracts define what an agent may observe, propose, and execute. They also define the checks that must pass before any action is allowed. A consistent pattern appears across work on telemetry query recommendation, diagnosis, root-cause analysis, configuration synthesis, change planning, and limited self-healing. Operational reliability does not come chiefly from the model itself. It depends on the machinery around the model. We also argue that evaluation should go beyond static question answering. Agentic NetOps and AIOps systems require workflow-centred evaluation, including trace quality, bounded tool use, safe proposal generation, replay in sandboxed environments, and canary trials with rollback-aware scoring. Without these measures, a system may appear robust yet remain too fragile. Finally, we examine security, privacy, and governance risks that become acute when agents sit close to operational control surfaces. Taken together, the survey concludes that progress in intelligent NetOps and AIOps will depend on treating autonomy as a constrained operational control problem, whose outputs must be reliable, auditable, and securely deployable.