NAB Show 2027 opens call for NAB BEIT Conference proposals

The call for papers highlights the industry's urgent transition toward cloud-native workflows and AI integration to manage increasingly complex streaming distribution. By prioritizing topics like terrestrial positioning and advanced analytics, the National Association of Broadcasters is signaling that the next phase of broadcast engineering will rely heavily on hybrid IT-centric architectures rather than traditional hardware silos. This shift forces streaming professionals to bridge the gap between legacy RF systems and modern software-defined networking. As Graham Media Group’s Adam Simpson noted, these technologists are defining the roadmap for audience engagement. Watch for the final speaker lineup in December to identify which specific AI and cloud implementations are gaining the most traction among broadcasters adopting hybrid infrastructure models.

The NAB Show ecosystem is converging on AI-driven network operations just as major vendors push agentic platforms into production. In June 2026, Ericsson launched its AI in RAN commercial software subscription claiming up to 20% higher downlink throughput across more than 15 live deployments, while Verizon disclosed that its 60,000-site vRAN network is now applying agentic AI to configuration changes and service assurance. These deployments represent the kind of AI-infrastructure topics the NAB BEIT Conference is actively soliciting for its 2027 program.

Nokia has moved aggressively to position itself at the center of this automation wave through multiple cloud partnerships. At DTW IGNITE 2026 in Copenhagen, Nokia teamed up with Google Cloud to build six specialized agents powered by Gemini technology for network operations, targeting 50% to 80% reductions in problem-solving times. The company plans to launch the agentic platform on Google Cloud Marketplace in September 2026, with a router agent and event triage agent available first via Nokia Assurance Center. Separately, Nokia combined with AWS and Databricks to build a unified telco AI control layer under its Autonomous Network Fabric architecture, claiming operators are already achieving automation rates above 90% and service interruption periods of one minute per year or fewer.

The competitive divergence between Ericsson and Nokia on AI-RAN strategy underscores the technical depth the NAB BEIT Conference is likely to attract. Ericsson and Nokia are diverging sharply on AI-RAN architecture, with Nokia building its entire RAN strategy on Nvidia GPUs and CUDA while Ericsson focuses on spectral efficiency gains from existing baseband silicon. Ericsson's proposition centers on more capacity and better economics from the same spectrum, whereas Nokia is pitching shared infrastructure for distributed AI workloads and new revenue streams. This architectural split mirrors the broader broadcast engineering debate between optimizing legacy hardware and adopting cloud-native, software-defined approaches that the 2027 conference call for papers explicitly encourages.