Google Cloud last week outlined plans to support telecom operators in becoming more autonomous.

Google views the shift as a critical part of the move to agentic AI, as the cloud giant unveiled new solutions during Mobile World Congress to help telcos manage their data resources and adopt agentic AI.

According to Google, telcos are currently struggling to navigate "data swamps."

"Today’s telcos must meet the needs of changing consumer behavior and deliver experiences that offer immediate, frictionless value. Yet, they are often hindered by a fragmented maze of disconnected legacy software," noted Angelo Libertucci, global head of industry, telecom, Google Cloud, via Google's blog.

Google claims it has the tools to help telcos to put their data to good use in better ways via three methods.

The hyperscaler said it's leveraging BigQuery’s latest evolution to "automate the heavy lifting of data preparation." Google explains that this tool integrates the latest Gemini models straight into the data lifecycle. Because of this, Google said it can automate the cleansing and tagging of massive amounts of network telemetry, "turning raw data into AI-ready information for telcos in a fraction of the time."

On top of this, Google is offering its Spanner Graph to serve as a digital twin for telcos. This, it notes, is a live, temporal map that unifies every relationship across the network, so that AI can sense exactly where a problem is and how it affects the system.

And finally, through a new partnership with DigitalRoute, Google plans to launch reusable data pipelines. "These act as high-speed filtration systems, transforming chaotic network signals into a single source of truth," noted Libertucci.

Telcos are already using these solutions, as Google points out, namely Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom.

"When these three areas work together, agents are grounded in reality, allowing them to sense a problem, reason through a solution, and act — often before a telco customer notices an issue," he said.

Monetization comes with higher autonomy

Libertucci explained to DCD that Google is looking to help telcos drive monetization opportunities.

In order to do this, however, Libertucci said that telcos need to reach a higher level of autonomy. As defined by the TM Forum, level 5 is fully autonomous and seen as the ultimate goal for telecom network evolution. Telcos are still some way off this, according to Libertucci.

"Level five is completely autonomous, with no human in the loop. For the most part, most telcos today, through the surveys that we've done, they'd say that they're at level two or two and a half," he told DCD.

The role of digital twins will play a key role in supporting these telcos, adds Google, which explains that its Spanner Graph allows agents to "see" the network's live state and query historical data — seeing how the network looked hours or days ago—to perform instant root-cause analysis.

"When you want to get to higher levels of autonomy, you need a digital twin," he adds. Spanner is the differentiated platform. It is the only platform that can support graph data, relational data, and unstructured data simultaneously at a global scale in real time with the lowest latency."