BT’s CTO, Phillip Stubbs, shared the telco’s network automation journey at Ericsson’s recent OSS/BSS conference. The UK telco is not in a hurry to build fully autonomous networks and is not a leader in this space. It defines its own middle ground, called ‘hyper-automation,’ which has a human agent overseeing network management. The strategy is inspired by the hyperscaler operating model, and ultimately aims to reduce the number of humans in the loop. “We are starting with the supervision scenario before we move to autonomous networks. We want to do this when people get completely bored with pressing the button to approve changes,” said BT’s CTO Stubbs. BT’s network includes 19,000 RAN sites and 5,000 exchanges and is running eight…