TM Forum's DTW23 successfully wrapped up last week at the Bella Center, Copenhagen, with over 3,700 attendees and 119 exhibitors from 114 countries. Amazon Web Services (AWS), the leading global cloud computing provider, showcased it's suite of solutions for the telecoms industry at the event's AWS Next Level balcony.
Ariana Lynn, Principal Analyst at The Fast Mode spoke to Tammy Whyman, Global Partner Lead for the Telco Industry at AWS in a brief interview on the company's participation at the event. Tammy explores AWS' demos and collaborations, as well as her thoughts on generative AI and the convergence between telco and cloud.
Ariana: What did AWS exhibit at DTW23’s The Loft? Were there any joint demos or showcases?
Tammy: Last week at DTW, Amazon Web Services (AWS) unveiled four generative AI demos, developed in collaboration with partners. We believe generative AI will have a profound impact across industries, telco included. In collaboration with partners from Snowflake, TELUS, Optus, and Salesforce, we featured four demos showcasing the power of generative AI to:
- Simplify network planning, installation, configuration and operations - Telecom Network Operations are made up of several complex business processes which require going through Terabytes of data every day to optimize the network, perform root causal analysis etc. Similarly, business support systems (BSS) capture similar volumes of customer data, customer complaints, billing history, and more. Yet combining these two data sets to uncover where network performance could influence customer churn is a tedious, mundane and time-intensive process. To solve this, AWS, Snowflake and DigitalRoute worked together to develop a new generative AI-based solution to more easily combine and parse this data to identify, troubleshoot and isolate performance issues. More information can be found in this blog post from Snowflake here.
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Enhance the customer experience - Many operators are already leveraging AI to augment human interactions and improve the consistency of experience and resolution speed. Generative AI can take these activities one step further. Building on our collaboration with TELUS to redefine the connected home, announced earlier this year, together AWS and TELUS demonstrate how generative AI technologies can improve and provide more personalized experiences for smart home users. Trained on vast amounts of data related to smart home devices, user preferences, and usage patterns, with continuous learning capabilities, the TELUS smart home solution can help consumers access more intelligent and intuitive interactions, and eliminate manual device discovery and complex smart home device setups.
Additionally, Optus SubHub, a digital subscription hub powered by AWS, makes it easier for consumers to manage their subscriptions. Customers can see which digital subscriptions they’re paying for, how much they’re paying for each, activate or deactivate subscriptions at the touch of a button, and access exclusive discounts and savings, to spend smarter. Subhub helps users discover the content they like and AWS demonstrates future use cases to make that even more intuitive by using generative AI, making it as simple as talking to a virtual friend. Learn more here. - Optimize business performance - Revenue leakage is a top concern for telco that can impact up to 10% of telco revenue; around $100B annually. Using AWS generative AI services, including Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Sagemaker Jumpstart, Salesforce is showcasing how enterprises can deploy generative AI for use cases including revenue assurance, employee dispatching, and empowering customer service agents with meaningful real-time insights.
Ariana: How has the convergence of telco and cloud changed CSP monetization strategies? What are some new growth opportunities?
Tammy: AWS is empowering telcos to transform from telco to tech-cos, creating new services that help industries digitize and innovate, while also monetizing 5G networks. Until recently, telcos have operated primarily as connectivity providers; building out and maintaining networks to sell connectivity services to businesses and consumers. As telcos modernize and move workloads to the cloud, they have greater opportunity to transform from telco to what we call a “tech-co.”
We see this coming to life in a few ways:
First, telcos can operate as digital service providers and using their networks to enrich their relationships with customers. In this process, traditional IT and Network operations can shift from a cost center to a value creator. For example, South Korean-based SK Telecom is transforming into an AI company. In Canada, we’re working with TELUS to create a platform for innovation, initially launching a new smart home solution. This solution will help consumers simplify the process of integrating and managing smart home solutions, with zero touch device detection and set-up, as well as guides to help create personalized automations. Sweden-based Telia created a machine learning application to provide an accurate picture of inventory in real-time for Finnish logistics leader, Transval.
The journey to become a “tech-co” also extends to advising and supporting the telcos’ enterprise customers in their journey to the cloud. Telcos already work with customers across verticals, and can partner with other technology providers or managed service providers to bundle their connectivity with these services to better serve their customers. For example, Switzerland's Swisscom is expanding the value it offers customers by training technical and commercial employees to advise and consult their customers on their cloud journey.
The shift to a “tech-co” involves transformation of human capital. By employing modern development practices, telcos can create an operational shift in the IT and network engine rooms. For example, Telia trained 2000 employees on AWS services which was pivotal to gain internal adoption of cloud practices and created a motivated workforce.
And finally, telcos can shift operations to use their network as a platform. This approach will provide a new way to monetize their network buildouts and spin up a new MVNO within a couple of days, which could also operate profitably with as few as 10,000 subscribers. A great example of this is how Mobi, a Hawaiian MVNO, worked with WG2 and AWS to launch its MVNO services across the continental U.S.
Ariana: What are your thoughts on artificial intelligence (AI), specifically generative AI? Where is it heading?
Tammy: At AWS, we see massive potential for generative AI and the profound impact it will have across all industries. It’s the next wave of widespread adoption of machine learning (ML), with the opportunity to enhance the customer experience, simplify network operations, and optimize business performance, particularly within the telco industry. By implementing generative AI across all business processes, telcos can examine profits, revenues, various consumer plans, customer expenses and charges, and provide recommendations on how to optimize offers to maximize profits.
At AWS, our approach to generative AI is to invest and innovate across three layers of the generative AI stack to take this technology out of the realm of research and make it available to customers of any size and developers of all skill levels.
For telcos specifically, we see three key ways generative AI will transform the industry:
- Enhance the customer experience - Already, many telcos leverage AI to augment human interactions and improve the consistency of experience and resolution speed. Generative AI can take these activities one step further with interactive voice response – an evolution of early chatbot deployments to help customers resolve issues or get answers to questions. In addition, generative AI can help analyze real-time call discussions to provide prompts and resources to help agents resolve customer inquiries. Customer service agents will play a key role in the process, but we believe generative AI can reinvent and improve every customer experience and application.
- Simplify network planning, installation, configuration and operations - Generative AI can play a key role in all aspects of the network lifecycle. Engineers rely on manuals and documented processes when installing network elements. Generative AI can ingest this data and provide interactive guidance and prompts to speed up and simplify installation tasks. Foundational models can also be trained on network topology and configuration data to suggest the configuration of network elements. Generative AI-based applications can recommend troubleshooting actions and procedures to networking operating engineers when there is a network failure.
- Optimize business performance - Generative AI can help telcos identify areas where they are losing revenue or incurring revenue leakage. Deployed across business processes, generative AI can examine profits, revenues, various consumer plans, expenses and customer charges to recommend how to evolve offerings to optimize profits. GenAI can also optimize win rates of large enterprise contracts by training models on previous RFP responses to drastically reduce time to respond and providing more accurate pricing in proposals.
Tammy Whyman is the global lead for telco partners at AWS. In this role, she works closely with global systems integrators (GSIs) and network equipment providers (NEPs) to help them promote and differentiate their business and services, as well as helping telcos unlock growth and monetize 5G networks, and help them on their journey from a communications service provider to a digital services provider. Prior to AWS, Tammy was the managing director for the Telecom & Media Strategy practice at Accenture where she launched the global Telecom Retail Strategy practice and built Accenture’s Telecom Strategy Analytics & Insights practice from the ground up.
