In conjunction with TM Forum’s DTW23 - Ignite, which kicks off today at the Bella Center, Copenhagen, Ariana Lynn, Principal Analyst at The Fast Mode spoke to Justin Reilly, CEO of Wavelo. Justin explores Wavelo's planned activities for the event and his thoughts on AI.
Ariana: Are there any plans to collaborate with other exhibitors or sponsors? Will Wavelo be running any joint demos or showcases?
Justin: At this year’s DTW, Wavelo is collaborating with industry-leading telecommunications providers (including Verizon, Etisalat, Telecom Egypt, and Botswana Telecommunications) and technology providers (Evergent, Infosys, i2i Systems, and Tata Consultancy Services) to demonstrate seamless billing across CSPs and partners in our Billing Hub Catalyst project.
As CSPs face continued pressure to increase ARPU from their customers, they increasingly seek partnerships to offer bundles with value-added products and services, such as streaming services, games, and apps. Interestingly, one of the hardest parts of executing these partnerships is billing. Misaligned billing cycles, lack of real-time integrations, and disparate billing systems are challenges that can lead to revenue loss and a less-than-ideal customer experience when launching value-adds from partners.
At Wavelo, we’ve solved the challenge of providing a single, consolidated billing experience for CSPs that offer multiple services, such as mobile and internet. Our collaborative demo will show how CSPs and partners can generate a consolidated and streamlined billing experience by leveraging the TM Forum standard APIs, an event-based architecture, and the Billing Hub framework. This functionality is only the first step. It has tremendous extensibility to support marketplaces, best-value offers for customers, and multi-currency support for cross-border partnerships.
Ariana: What are some emerging trends and technologies that you expect will power digital transformation in the telco space in the next year? What are your thoughts on artificial intelligence (AI) and where is it heading?
Justin: I’m encouraged by a range of trends in AI: advancements in LLMs [Large Language Models], text to image generation, generative AI, and computer vision to name a few. Ultimately, this technology will be embedded in everything we use as humans over the next decade.
I believe we’ll see AI implemented across all aspects of the customer and employee experience, with a hyper focus on driving down cost of acquisition and cost to serve thanks to automation. For telecoms, the challenge that remains now is how to take the appropriate action for tasks like billing or customer support when it means hitting a series of systems that are decades old. The truth is that infrastructure must be built or rebuilt to accommodate modern tools. In a modular, event-based architecture system every interaction from a customer, whether through a chatbot or with a human, creates an “event”. This event and the data it produces is then recorded and automatically shared with its appropriate system of record, along with any other system that needs to be aware.
Layering AI on top of millions of events gives the machines exactly what they need—mountains of data that’s easily accessed, organized and extrapolated for insights. Now the data is precise, current, and readily accessible. With the right infrastructure in place, layering AI with billing can help telecoms improve customer experience, drive down average handle time for customer support and make more informed business decisions. So I urge operators to start playing with the latest advancements in machine learning, so that they are prepared for the wave of tomorrow. It might be exactly what your business needs.
Justin Reilly is an industry veteran with deep experience in telecom, SaaS and consumer products. He is passionate about building systems that support the next generation of consumers. As CEO of Wavelo, Justin is focused on helping operators maximize value from their networks and enhance their customer experience. Previously, Justin has held roles as the Chief Product Officer at Tucows and the Head of Product at Verizon. Over the years, he has also founded a number of companies in healthcare, digital products, and telecom.
