- Carriers may not be as fast as Hyper Scalar, but they are scrambling to incorporate AI
- Both Vodafone and BT have taken steps to encourage internal use of AI applications
- BT and Vodafone executives believe human engineers are still essential to their business
DTW Ignit, Copenhagen -If there is an overarching theme running through the DTW Ignite event on the TM Forum, it is the lack of speed of transformation within the telecom industry. Certainly, it was a universally recognized truth and for a while. The big question about the elephant in the room is as AI is in the phone company photo:
“We're not the fastest industry,” said Mark Newman, chief analyst at the TM Forum, at a panel in Copenhagen today. “How do you deal with the fierce speed of AI technology and the slower speeds of which telecoms move?”
BT's chief digital officer, Howard Watson, answered questions by protecting telecoms, saying that when Covid hit in March 2020, BT and other service providers “worked at a fierce speed” to allow their country's citizens to work from home. “We can work quickly,” he said, but it's generally difficult for 188-year-old companies like BT to work as fast as Hyper Scholars.
Regarding AI, which is moving across the industry with “Brayneck Speed,” BT said it is taking an approach to experimenting with various groups within the company and innovating with AI.
“Now you can see 50 examples where there is a team that ran the AI solutions we developed. It's definitely around us,” he said.
Vodafone CTO Scott Petty said AI needs a change in mindset to quickly and innovate at scale. To this end, Vodafone has invested heavily in educating everyone in the company on how to use AI and creating training programs for specific roles in the business. He said it is important to “democratize” AI by providing access to AI tools and encouraging employees to use them.
AI is different
AI is another animal in the telecom business, which means a different approach. “We usually do technology vertically,” Petty said. “The pace of change is too fast and won't work in AI space. You'll need to move to a much more horizontal platform model.”
Newman asked the two operator executives if they still deploy AI on a large scale. Watson said BT has been using computational AI for years. “It's really the right solution for that process,” he said.
However, when it comes to Genai, it is important to state that Vodafone has tens of thousands of users in certain use cases, and focusing on a limited number of use cases to get started. “When you do thousands of proof of concepts, you always get to the proof of concept level,” Petty said. “We are confident that we can build AI applications with tens of millions of users. We define this as scale.”
Watson said one of BT's partners wouldn't let anyone out who — encourages staff to use AI to find efficiency. “The approach they are taking is that they are providing staff if they can demonstrate using co-pilots or other tools that they saved an hour a day.
To oversee AI work, BT created the AI Center of Excellence. “We make sure it has the right guardrail in place, and the experts there know how to process AI and data,” Watson said.
One concern at the DTW show is whether AI will drive engineers out of work. But Watson said, “An engineer who knows how Cisco, Juniper, or Nokia routers work is still hoping. If you don't pay attention, everyone will work on the application and forget about the network.”
Petty says, “There's always a human in the loop in a huge set of functions. Cisco engineers are a great example. Engineering AI chatbots help you understand the configuration code, but they require the logic of “what are you doing?” ”
Catch all the coverage of this year DTW Ignite Show is here.
