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AI is changing what customers need from connectivity providers and who those providers need to work with. Supporting workloads across enterprise sites, clouds, and data centers creates opportunities to sell new services and reach more customers. Capturing that business depends on combining capabilities across organizations and coordinating delivery at the speed customers expect.
Mplify’s work helps members compete beyond the limits of their own networks and capabilities. Its three strategic priorities address the services AI requires, the automation used to buy and manage them, and the trusted partnerships needed to deliver them. NaaS for AI, Agentic Lifecycle Service Orchestration (LSO), and NaaS Federation together support an automated network service supply chain for AI.
Three short videos from CTO Pascal Menezes’s presentation at the Mplify Member Summit – Americas in Boston explain this direction and what it means for providers and their ecosystem partners.
NaaS for AI: Supporting Distributed Workloads
AI training and inference create different connectivity demands. Training across locations can involve moving datasets and synchronizing model updates. Inference, which uses a trained model to generate an output, connects applications and devices to models that may run in a cloud, a regional data center, or an enterprise environment. The location of those resources and the requirements of the application influence the services needed to connect them.
The NaaS for AI video examines this connectivity opportunity, including how Carrier Ethernet’s defined performance attributes and on-demand capabilities can support enterprise AI workloads. Capacity can increase when models need to synchronize and decrease when that demand subsides, giving providers a way to apply established capabilities to changing customer requirements.
Connectivity sits within a broader NaaS for AI agenda that also encompasses automation, cybersecurity, and AI-related services. Common service definitions and performance requirements help buyers and sellers understand what can be delivered across different environments. For providers, that creates opportunities to build on existing investments and combine their services with partners whose capabilities extend their own.
Watch: What Is NaaS for AI?
Agentic LSO: Building on Established Automation
A service that spans providers depends on a sequence of business and operational interactions. A buyer checks availability, requests a quote, and places an order. The organizations involved then need to track delivery and manage the service throughout its lifecycle. Mplify’s LSO standards and APIs provide common processes and information models for automating these exchanges.
Agentic LSO extends that work with AI agents that can perform routine tasks and coordinate workflows. The Agentic LSO video explains how Model Context Protocol (MCP) connects agents to LSO API functions. It also introduces Mplify’s agent blueprint, which sets out the skills, knowledge, and tools needed for tasks such as quoting and ordering.
The rules behind those tasks matter. An agent needs to understand the service information it receives, the actions available to it, and how those actions fit into the wider process. Mplify’s API behavior and data models provide that grounding. The broader Agentic LSO work develops this approach while keeping people in control and existing business systems responsible for official records.
For organizations already using LSO APIs, agent-enabled automation builds on those investments. Common implementation patterns can help companies extend automation across more tasks and partner relationships without designing every interaction from the beginning.
Watch: What Is Agentic LSO?
NaaS Federation: Establishing Trusted Collaboration
Finding a partner involves more than identifying an organization with network coverage in a particular location. Buyers also need to understand its services, supported APIs, and relevant credentials. As agents participate in these interactions, organizations need ways to verify who an agent represents and what it is authorized to do.
NaaS Federation brings these requirements into a common approach to governance, trust, and interoperability. The NaaS Federation video illustrates partner discovery: a buyer could identify potential partners using information about their geographic reach, service capabilities, and supported automation. A Carrier Ethernet example shows how those details can help narrow the search to providers that meet a specific requirement.
The wider federation initiative establishes the conditions for participants to build their own service supply chains. Discovery helps organizations find one another, while credentials and shared participation rules support trust. Agentic LSO supports the service transactions that follow. Participants retain their direct commercial relationships and control of their own services.
This work gives members a way to explore opportunities beyond their individual footprints. Service providers can combine reach, and other ecosystem participants can contribute the technology or infrastructure needed to deliver a complete offering.
Watch: What Is NaaS Federation?
Putting the Priorities to Work
Consider an enterprise connecting AI resources across several countries. Its workload determines the service requirements. Delivering those services may require partners with complementary capabilities, supported by automated processes for purchasing and ongoing management. The three priorities address different parts of that same delivery challenge, with standards and certification supporting confidence in service performance and interoperability.
Mplify brings organizations together to develop these shared foundations while each company competes through its own offerings and expertise. That collaboration can help members expand their reach and respond to customer requirements that span several providers.
Learn More
- For an overview of Mplify’s vision, strategy, and roadmap watch our three short explainers: What Is NaaS for AI?, What Is Agentic LSO?, What Is NaaS Federation?
- View Mplify CTO Pascal Menezes presentation, NaaS for the Agentic AI Era: Mplify Vision, Strategy, and Roadmap, from the Mplify Member Summit – Americas.
- Learn how Mplify membership can help an organization contribute to this work and connect with potential partners.