AI adoption challenges and breakthroughs: a live discussion

Today on Zero-Touch Telecom Live, we welcomed Monica Paolini of Senza Fili to discuss the real challenges and early breakthroughs in telco AI adoption. Monica speaks to everybody in the industry, across operators, vendors and innovators. Her views represent her learnings from these discussions.

The replay is available now below.

Monica kicked off the conversation pointing out that while hype can lead to inflated expectations, it also serves the purpose of attracting attention and focus, eventually extending to realistic and impactful implementations.

Here are additional key takeaways from the discussion:

• AI needs to be deeply integrated, everywhere: Successful AI adoption requires embedding AI deeply into products, culture and organizational structures. It can't just be bolted on as an extra feature, but rather, viewed as a pervasive enabler that can transform operations.
• Energy efficiency is a leading use case: Energy efficiency is one of the most compelling early applications of AI in telecom given clear and measurable outcomes.
• Avoid the silo trap: Creating AI departments will just lead to new silos. Instead, AI should be integrated across all functions to facilitate adoption and maximize potential.
• Invest in organization-wide AI literacy: Upskilling employees to understand and use AI is important. Specifically, generative AI can help junior engineers accelerate learning. However, there is no shortcut to achieving expert levels of understanding, which will ultimately require deep, hands-on experience.

If Monica were CEO of an operator implementing AI, she said she would set clear business goals and make sure AI was integrated into the existing organization via realistic plans that maintain a sense of urgency—all while being mindful that adoption could take as much as twice the amount of time expected.

Join the Conversation

Watch the replay of our conversation now and check out Monica's recent work and industry conversations in the links of this post.

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