In the aftermath of TM Forum’s highly successful DTW23 - Ignite, Ariana Lynn, Principal Analyst at The Fast Mode spoke to Carla Penedo, Director of Offer Development and Innovation, Celfocus. Carla discusses Celfocus’ participation in the event, her predictions for the next year and her thoughts on generative AI.
Ariana: Did Celfocus participate in any speaking opportunities? What are some of the key points that you covered?
Carla: It was such a pleasure to co-present “AI-powered service usage anomaly detection” case study for Vodafone IoT, with Sampada Basarkar, Director of Products & Platform Engineering, at DTW this year.
Vodafone’s IoT network supports over 162 million connections in over 190 countries. Customers include multiple global brands, many relying on Vodafone's IoT network to provide business-critical services, which requires monitoring the network performance 24x7x365.
Next Generation Monitoring solution, developed by Celfocus, addresses the mission to be “Faster and Better" to detect IoT service usage anomalies proactively and with higher accuracy, thereby enabling Vodafone to resolve issues sooner and with less operational effort. The “Faster” goal was achieved by designing the solution to ingest IoT core connectivity service usage records from the telco network in real-time and are integrated in a service monitoring analytical layer capable of ingesting and serving real-time data so that the Portal Operational views are always updated with fresh data and queries served with sub-second latencies. The “Better” goal was achieved by the design and development of an online AI Anomaly Detection Engine consisting of an ensemble of ML algorithms trained continuously over time. This enables real-time detection of service usage anomalies in pre-learnt combined traffic trends of business/industry, customer, geographical and telco network elements.
Ariana: What are some emerging trends and technologies that you expect will power digital transformation in the telco space in the next year?
Carla: According to our experience mainly with CSPs Tier 1 and market trends, there are 3 main trends shaping the industry right now that are key to power digital transformation in the telco space in the next few years:
- Machine learning: Even though there still may be space for some improvement in data ecosystems, mainly in data governance, Telco have already large data platform solutions, most of them in the cloud. However, a great data platform will lack purpose if data is not used to create business value. Machine learning is the best option to generate meaningful insights and unravelling hidden correlations that can better guide business decisions.
- Hyperautomation: Currently, most Telcos are deploying RPA, common BPM solutions to automate their business and scattered scripts for its network. Albeit enabling quicker results, these tools alone are unable to guarantee end-to-end business process automation and network resource orchestration. Hyperautomation is the framework to overcome such limitations and scale automation capabilities, by combining common automation tools with AI and Machine Learning to fully orchestrate and streamline business processes, and network resources driven by data at the core.
- Generative AI: We are only scratching the surface of Generative AI’s capabilities. Nevertheless, it is undoubtful the productivity potential that lies ahead. We have never been so challenged to be productive and efficient, keeping the pace up with the digital era. Generative AI has the power not only to augment Telco's daily tasks, but also the capability to communicate with the Telco’s technology and private data/documents, in a much simple and intuitive way.
Ariana: What are your thoughts on artificial intelligence (AI), specifically generative AI? Where is it heading?
Carla: Generative AI came to accelerate the sense of urgency in applying AI to solve business challenges, improve performance and delight customers. AI is inevitable, it’s just a question of how fast we can adapt and evolve.
Generative AI is leading us to a reinvented work paradigm where a new relationship between humans and machines is emerging. By embracing Gen AI, intelligence is augmented through curated insights that humans can interpret for higher-value decision-making. Keeping humans in the loop is paramount to success, not only to guarantee greater impact and accuracy, but also to limit bias and subjectivity when delivering content to final customers. Gen AI holds tremendous potential for significant advancements that shall also be used cautiously to ensure its alignment with human values and positive impact in societies.
Carla Penedo is the Director of Offer Development & Innovation at Celfocus, a European high-tech system integrator company, committed to creating business value through analytics and cognitive. Carla focuses on providing data-driven technological solutions to accelerate digital network transformation, uplift and monetize business services, and provide highly personalised customer experiences. Carla has spent +20 years delivering high-value transformative data solutions with a track record in Telco, Financial Services, Energy and Utilities. She has in-depth knowledge and experience in Analytics, Big Data, AI & Machine Learning technologies. With an MBA and Computer Science (Artificial Intelligence) degree, Carla balances consulting with university teaching.
