As telcos get serious about AI, they are thinking about the broader data and business strategy implications that limit or enable success.
Rakuten Symphony executives Anshul Bhatt, Chief Product Officer, BU Intelligent Operations, and Geoff Hollingworth Chief Marketing Officer, addressed the realities of AI-powered outcomes in remarks delivered at MWC Las Vegas 2024.
Bhatt was part of a panel on the topic of “The Next Boom: Scaling Up Generative AI In Verticals,” where he joined speakers from Anthropic, Nokia Cloud & Network Services and Verizon.
Bhatt set the stage by differentiating the use of AI in Rakuten’s 70+ internet businesses and its use of AI in telecom through its work with Rakuten Mobile. Telco networks are regulated, resulting in the need for new technologies to meet extensive security and uptime requirements.
Bhatt referenced the TM Forum six-stage AI network automation framework, saying that most operators are making progress with many having achieved stage 3 which is defined as “conditional automation.” To evolve to levels 4 and 5 and achieve the next stages of autonomy, telcos need to overcome their siloed data structure and create a new unified data structure.
As Bhatt puts it, “If (telcos) want to move to level four, level five, then there has to be a shift into a unified data strategy and I think that's where telcos are lagging. It’s time to focus on digitalization and data strategies—then we can talk about AI.”
While Bhatt focused on data strategy, Hollingworth shared his thoughts about AI’s impact on business strategy as part of the Telco AI Summit held at MWC Las Vegas.
He joined representatives from companies such as Microsoft, Intel, Marvell, Verizon and others, delivering a keynote presentation with a clear message: “If AI changes your business strategy, then something was wrong with your business strategy.”
Hollingworth emphasized that AI should help telcos to do things better, faster and at scale. Thus, it shouldn’t redefine business strategy but, rather, make the execution of it much more efficient.
For telcos to understand how to use AI, they need to know what the technology means to the business and how it works. To illustrate this, Hollingworth explains the difference between a techco and a telco.
Techcos start with a perspective of how to change the existing world to be better for the customer and themselves. That's why for an internet company, AI is nothing new. It is just oxygen to fuel the existing fire of a data-driven organization that allows them to do things that couldn't be done before.
Telcos understand technology and data delivery. The struggle is to find growth that can accelerate their journey away the commoditized, hyper-competitive markets of today. Once a telco has this as a business strategy, then technologies like 5G and AI will make sense.
Hollingworth echoed Bhatt's emphasis on managing and curating the data structure, commenting that AI is nothing more than another software algorithm—except that the complexity has shifted from the code to the data.
Done right, AI does not change the business strategy but allows telcos to execute better by operating at a different scale, with new cost structures and faster timeframes. The journey is not about quick wins but grinding it out over the next decade and becoming proficient. The organizations that succeed will be the ones that understand AI deeply and apply it thoughtfully, making incremental improvements to processes along the way.
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