Telstra and Dell Technologies Advance AI-Driven Telco Cloud Automation

Key takeaways: Telstra and Dell Technologies are joining forces to modernize sovereign telco cloud infrastructure.

Telstra and Dell Technologies have collaborated on a new, AI-enabled telco cloud capability to advance autonomous network operations. As telco clouds grow more complex, traditional self-healing methods based on fixed, predefined rules lack the flexibility to keep up. Telstra’s deployment with Dell demonstrates how agentic AI can strengthen infrastructure resilience by allowing the network to adapt and respond intelligently. For Telstra, it presents a way to reduce outages and deliver smoother performance at peak load through infrastructure that can detect, decide and resolve issues on its own.

Adaptive resilience powers modern networks

Telstra and Dell have delivered an innovative deployment to demonstrate how agentic AI can be embedded into telco cloud infrastructure to improve operational resilience and lifecycle automation.

The deployment was realized within a multi-vendor architecture utilizing Dell’s AI-ready infrastructure together with its Telecom Infrastructure Automation Suite (DTIAS) to form the automation and orchestration foundation. The platform enabled an integrated environment capable of network observation, analysis and automated response.

Within this environment, the Dell Telecom Infrastructure Automation Suite delivers infrastructure telemetry, integrates automation and agentic AI capabilities with Model Context Protocol (MCP) and natural language. A conversational interface enables Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) to engage the AI agent for deeper analysis and informed next-best-action decisions, allowing Telstra to dynamically manage and reallocate hardware resources in real time.

This initiative supports Telstra Autonomous Networks (TAN) and Connected Future 2030 (CF30) strategy and aligns with the Telstra Reference Architecture Model (TRAM).

Intelligent automation for dynamic network needs

The new telco cloud supports both containerized and virtualized network functions on a multi-vendor architecture designed to enhance resiliency. Telstra is demonstrating how agentic AI can perform infrastructure self-healing using the Dell Telecom Infrastructure Automation Suite, automatically migrating critical network applications to new hardware when unplanned outages occur, without manual intervention. Unlike conventional rule-based self-healing, this AI approach applies intelligence to make dynamic, context-aware decisions, resulting in faster recovery and more resilient operations.

Telstra and Dell will continue to build on these learnings as part of Telstra’s broader innovation journey toward AI-enabled network operations.