How KDDI uses AI

KDDI and Ericsson ran a large scale field trial in KDDI's live production network in Japan of an AI driven Uplink Interference Optimizer (UIO) rApp on the Ericsson Intelligent Automation Platform, covering a multi technology, multi band cluster of about 1,500 5G cells and 1,300 4G cells. The rApp learns from cell configurations and radio conditions and recommends power control parameters to reduce uplink interference without a network engineer tuning each cell by hand.

Ericsson reports average uplink throughput gains of 9.6% on 4G and 3.1% on 5G and a 27% improvement in 5G signal to interference plus noise ratio, and says the rApp reached General Availability during the trial and was assessed at autonomy level 3.86 on the TM Forum's ANLET scale, a step toward KDDI's stated goal of Level 4 autonomous network operation.

KDDI and AltiusLink, its customer support joint venture with Mitsui & Co., used voice recognition tools to automate the evaluation of every recorded call at the "KDDI Customer Center" instead of sampling calls manually, so quality managers get full coverage and can give operators targeted feedback. The companies had already used generative AI to resolve 85 percent of chats on the "au Support" LINE account without escalation. KDDI and AltiusLink announced in November 2024 that they would package this customer support DX know how into a new joint business for other companies, and the initiative won the Best Technology award at the Contact Center Awards 2024.

KDDI deployed Nokia's AVA Performance Degradation Detection and Resolution (PDDR) solution nationwide to monitor its 4G and 5G radio network around the clock. The model detects performance degradations that raise no alarm, so called silent cells, classifies the likely root cause, and hands recoverable cases to KDDI's own recovery system, which tries to fix them automatically. Recovered cells feed back into the training data. KDDI started on 4G in 2019 and extended the system to its 5G NSA network in 2021.