China Unicom faced a problem common to many communication service providers: As it rolled out 5G alongside its existing 2G, 3G and 4G networks it encountered greater operational complexity, an issue that was compounded by regionally disparate, siloed operations and legacy equipment. As a result, it struggled to capture and analyze the data it needed to attain consistently high levels of network efficiency, network availability and customer experiences, and to drive 5G service innovation. The inability to quickly identify, capture and analyze the right data was also curtailing China Unicom’s ambition to offer customers highly personalized services and to take full advantage of 5G’s capabilities to support new enterprises, mixed reality, smart city and autonomous driving services. The need for greater network operation automation based on real-time intelligence was pressing, so China Unicom collaborated with Huawei to build an AI-based platform to centralize data gathering, analysis and operational management support for the whole of China. Based on Huawei’s AUTIN and other operation and management platforms, it uses AI models to collect and analyze networks and operations data. Its functions are wide-ranging and include automatically evaluating the best locations for network sites, self-healing of networks, enabling new 5G service partnerships, and making it possible to precisely target marketing efforts. With its new system, called the ‘Middle-End Network Platform’, China Unicom can automatically access the data it needs from anywhere on its network, making data collection more efficient and allowing more diverse data services to be included. In addition, the platform facilitates network operation and maintenance by using AI learning to automatically predict and prevent faults based on 1000+ KPIs, with a prediction accuracy of 85%, according to China Unicom. One of the notable benefits of the new AI-driven platform is the way it allows China Unicom to both improve its service to large national Chinese enterprises and to forge new 5G partnerships through intensive network operations.