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International telecommunications giant NTT expects energy consumption and value-based pricing of generative AI models to be one of the most important challenges facing businesses as they move towards wider adoption and integration of burgeoning technology doing.
During a panel discussion at the VentureBeat Transform 2023 conference on Wednesday with NTT VC founding partner Vab Goel, NTT CFO and senior EVP Takashi Hiroi discussed new guidelines and resilience. He predicted that a global system would help mitigate some of the harms predicted by experts today.
“This approach is no different from building a traditional system integration system,” says Takashi.
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IT support by AI
With nearly $100 billion in revenue, NTT accounts for a significant portion of the system integration market revenue and has 100,000 enterprise customers. NTT is no stranger to deploying AI in various areas of the company.
Founded in 1987, the NTT Group now operates globally in over 70 countries and employs over 300,000 people. The company offers a wide range of technology solutions and services including network, cloud, data center, mobile and IT management. NTT Group has continuously evolved from its telephony roots to become an innovative player in emerging technologies such as 5G, AI, IoT and quantum cryptography. Through its Silicon Valley arm, NTT VC, the company invests in early-stage technology startups globally.
NTT Group is already leveraging OpenAI’s popular text-to-text large-scale language model (LLM) ChatGPT, AI-based translation service Cohota, and marketing data services with behavior prediction for IT support in Japan.
The Future Direction of Edge-Based Computing
Telecom giants are focusing their research on solving the growing energy demands of edge-based computing to power local AI systems.
“AI requires enormous energy consumption and data processing is done as close to the user as possible,” says Takashi. “So we started offering edge computing services as soon as possible.”
He continued that power from renewable sources will be part of the way forward.
Additionally, the economic challenge of pricing AI services correctly was also a top priority for the CFO. Acknowledging the complexity of the issue, Takashi said he doesn’t have a precise answer to the question, but that pricing will be driven by a better understanding of the value AI can bring to businesses.
“It’s interesting as a CFO. I think you’re thinking about pricing, not just technology,” Goel said during the discussion. “Normally in today’s world, everything is commoditized and the competition is very high. Value-based pricing just doesn’t work for most companies.”
A similar issue has been resolved before
Takashi wasn’t too worried about AI’s threat to employment in general. He noted that the trend toward automation is nothing new. “Looking back at the history of industrial development, automation systems were introduced in various countries in the 1960s, [since] It’s increasing,” Takashi said. “Yes, we can solve that problem.”
And when asked about ethical concerns around using AI, Takashi pointed to video streaming platform YouTube. There are still problems there, but we still manage to enjoy these services today. Takashi said NTT is developing guidelines to crack down on the use of sensitive information in AI systems, although it is still in its early stages.
“AI was created by someone,” says Takashi. “Companies that provide system integration services using AI, [deal with] ethical issues. ”
Both large and small businesses can find synergies
Goel offered his own take, suggesting that smaller AI companies work closely with larger companies to get their products up and running as quickly as possible for customers.
“I think my advice would be to broaden the scope and really look at some very early stage companies,” Goel said. “Some of them are even at the PowerPoint level. Go-to-market companies are very important.”
In March, NTT announced a joint venture with Cisco to roll out a 5G-based private network.
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