If 2023 was the year AI burst into boardroom discussions, 2024 will be the year AI is applied to more use cases across the enterprise and across industries. Telecommunications is one sector poised to embrace AI in a major way, with Allied Market Research projecting telecoms’ AI spend to reach $38.8 billion by 2031. A number of areas will contribute to this, from AI-infused customer service to new software solutions, but many such deployments have long-term timelines. What can network operators do during the first few months of 2024 to get a quick AI win and demonstrate the potential of their AI strategy?
They can start by infusing AI into their network digital twins.
Digital twins have been around for decades. Although they’re often associated with manufacturing, nearly every industry has leveraged them to achieve some sort of tangible benefit. Yet applying AI to digital twins makes the technology really come to life.
As long as network operators have existed, they’ve struggled to identify markets with a high return on investment (ROI). Operators may use the latest technologies and new techniques to build the network, but monetizing that network and gaining market share are where many operators struggle.
AI and ML can fill that gap and accelerate ROI by reducing uncertainty in business-planning assumptions, providing hyper-local recommendations about where to invest, and auto-generating network design scenarios based on population, socio-economic factors, market conditions, external trends and regulation. When integrated, these use cases can quickly deliver tangible benefits.
One area in which operators can see near-immediate improvement is combining AI with a digital twin to identify expansion opportunities or greenfield builds based on property and housing trends. Using reputable population data and forecasts, AI can predict the most profitable areas for fiber or 4G/5G network growth based on the likelihood of future customer expansion. With projections about where future demand will be greatest, operators can identify the locations where network investments will have the greatest possible returns.
Once they’ve identified where to expand, operators can then use AI and digital twins to make hyper-localized decisions about how to design, build, and optimize their network for maximum coverage. This offers a number of marketing opportunities and an improved customer experience in specific locations.
While those are longer-term benefits, forward-looking network operators can also gain an early-mover advantage with AI. Using traditional software, the decision-making process above could take a few months for an operator to say it’s sufficiently planned a network for a city. The plan might not even be accurate, thus degrading the revenue potential of that build. Using AI, the process can be compressed to just a few days – up to a 90% reduction – and operators can model in near-real time how minor adjustments to their plan might affect performance, identifying further optimization opportunities.
This may sound like a pipe dream, but it’s not. A leading operator in Johannesburg is already applying this framework and achieving meaningful results. The opportunity exists for other global operators to adopt this approach for a quick AI win.
Other quick AI-enabled victories can come in the form of operational benefits beyond network builds and optimization. For example, combining AI with a digital twin can enable operators to perform proactive and predictive maintenance that will help them mitigate the risk of network issues that hamper the customer experience. In fact, Tractica predicts that more than 55% of all AI investments in telecom will come from network and IT operations and maintenance by 2025. Fortunately, such investments can be made easily while delivering quick returns.
AI can also enable automated troubleshooting, identify network trends to predict potential points of failure, and perform cross-functional root cause analyses. Cognitive systems can even dynamically allocate resources. Such applications require more than an overnight implementation, of course, but they also can be done efficiently with the right teams and experts in place.
Longer-term, network integration will be a significant growth area for operators in the years to come. That growth can be significantly accelerated by operators who embrace AI during the early days of that timeline.
Using AI, operators can make quick and informed decisions about where to build, how to build, and which technologies to utilize in their build. This information, in turn, will empower operators to achieve their vision of network monetization and gain a competitive advantage over those who use traditional software rather than an AI-plus-digital-twin framework.
In short, AI can help network operators make better decisions about their build configurations, identify pockets of high investment value that might have otherwise been overlooked, and ultimately accelerate their path to profitability. This recent webinar on digital twins outlines some of the first steps operators can take. In 2024, when the mandate from the Board and C-suite is to deploy proofs of concept and deliver short-term ROI, implementing an AI-enabled digital twin is a crucial first step to getting some quick AI wins and paving the way for operators’ continued tech-fueled innovation.
