NEC has demonstrated agentic AI-driven automation for 5G Core network functions, reducing User Plane Function (UPF) deployment timelines from weeks to hours in collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS). The milestone, announced ahead of MWC 2026 in Barcelona, targets one of the most operationally complex elements of 5GC and future 6G architectures: lifecycle management of the UPF.
The demonstration showed how AI agents autonomously manage the full UPF lifecycle, from design and construction to deployment, monitoring, anomaly detection, and self-healing. NEC embedded operational knowledge from commercial carrier networks into AI models that automatically generate and execute deployment procedures. Using AWS’s “Kiro” agentic AI environment with integrated development and command-line tooling, NEC validated that automated orchestration can compress design-to-service-launch intervals to a few hours. The system also verified automated anomaly detection and corrective actions without human intervention using AWS AI services.
NEC said the approach reduces manual configuration, minimizes human error, and simplifies fault isolation. The cloud-based operational model enables deployment across centralized, edge, and on-premises environments. NEC will showcase the validated environment at the AWS booth during MWC Barcelona 2026 (March 2–5). The project also received partial support from Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) under grant No. JPJ012368G50701.
- Autonomous lifecycle management of 5GC UPF, including design, deployment, monitoring, and self-healing
- Reduction of deployment timelines from several weeks to a few hours (based on NEC comparison to manual methods)
- AI-generated and executed UPF deployment procedures using AWS agentic AI tooling
- Automated anomaly detection and remediation without human intervention
- Cloud-native deployment flexibility across core, edge, and on-premises environments
- Designed to address CSP labor shortages and reduce operational complexity
“The telecommunications industry is at an inflection point where AI-driven automation is becoming essential to build a competitive advantage by serving the end-customers faster and reducing the operating costs. NEC’s breakthrough in autonomous UPF orchestration demonstrates how AWS AI services can fundamentally transform network operations, enabling communications service providers to deploy complex 5G infrastructure in hours rather than weeks.” — Amir Rao, Global Director, GTM and Telco Solutions at Amazon Web Services
🌐 Analysis
NEC’s focus on autonomous UPF orchestration aligns with broader industry efforts to move from workflow automation to intent-based, AI-native operations in 5G-Advanced and early 6G architectures. Competitors including Ericsson, Nokia, and Samsung have highlighted AI-driven RAN and core automation at MWC 2026, signaling a shift toward embedding operational expertise directly into AI models rather than relying solely on external orchestration layers.
By targeting the UPF — a performance-critical and increasingly distributed function in edge-heavy 5G deployments — NEC addresses a bottleneck in service rollout and MEC scaling. As operators expand edge compute for AI and low-latency services, reducing lifecycle management complexity at the core could become a differentiator in multi-cloud 5GC deployments.
