The growing adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) has shown its potential to help the telecom sector improve network operational efficiency and optimize revenue.
A recent survey of telecommunications and IT engineers conducted on behalf of Ciena found that nearly 60% of respondents believe efficiency gains of 40% or more are well within their means.
Ciena is a networking systems, systems, and software company headquartered in the United States. The study, which gathered the opinions of more than 1,500 communications and IT engineers and managers from communications service providers (CSPs) in 17 countries around the world, found that at a time when data traffic loads are already putting significant strain on networks. It's clear that AI capabilities are being seen as a silver bullet of sorts for network operations teams.
Additionally, the increased use of cloud-based AI workload processing will further strain telcos' capex and opex budgets as petabytes of data flow between enterprise IT systems and cloud platforms. Masu.
The report noted that the rosy outlook isn't just limited to AI's potential for operational efficiency gains, as 85% of survey respondents expressed confidence (very confident or somewhat confident) in their CSPs' “ability to monetize AI traffic across their networks.”
The industries expected to generate the most AI traffic (and therefore offer the highest revenue opportunities) are financial services (identified by 46 percent of respondents), media and entertainment (43 percent), and manufacturing (38 percent).
As for how this new revenue will be generated, Siena points out: “40% believe revenue will be generated by opening their network to third-party integration. 37% believe revenue will be generated from security and privacy services. The same number (37%) believe revenue will be generated by opening their networks to third-party integration. 35% believe revenue will be generated by creating customized subscription packages; 34% believe revenue will be generated by differentiating connectivity quality.”
Interestingly, Ciena noted that there are some clear differences between respondents across countries when it comes to the issue of monetizing AI traffic: For example, while the majority of CSP respondents (90% or more) in India, Indonesia, Singapore, South Korea, Norway, Mexico, etc. are confident in monetizing AI traffic, far fewer respondents in the United States (55%) and Japan are any type of confident in such results.
The report expects 85% to be corroborated. Because if CSPs are unable to generate additional revenue streams from the AI traffic running on their networks, they are increasingly likely to suffer financially. Low return on network investment.
“The overall positive outlook from survey respondents was not lost on Ciena,” said Jürgen Hatheier, international CTO at Ciena. “The survey highlights CSPs' optimistic long-term outlook on AI's ability to enhance their networks and the need for strategic planning and investment in infrastructure and expertise to fully realize its benefits.”
