- Telcos may not be as fast as hyperscalers, but they're scrambling to incorporate AI
- Both Vodafone and BT are taking steps to encourage internal use of AI applications
- Executives from BT and Vodafone think human engineers are still going to be vital to their businesses
DTW IGNITE, COPENHAGEN — If there is an overarching theme running through TM Forum's DTW Ignite event, it's the lack of speed of transformation within the telecom industry. Indeed, it's a truth universally acknowledged — and it has been for a while. Now that AI is in the telco picture, the big elephant-in-the-room question is: Will anything change?
"We are not the fastest-moving industry," said Mark Newman, chief analyst with the TM Forum, during a panel in Copenhagen today. "As we look at the breakneck speed of AI technology and the slow speed at which telcos move. How do we address that?"
Howard Watson, chief digital officer with BT, answered the question by defending telcos, saying that when Covid hit in March 2020, BT and other service providers “worked at breakneck speed” to allow their countries’ citizens to work from home. “There are times we can work fast,” he said, but generally it’s hard for a 188-year old company such as BT to work as fast as hyperscalers.
When it comes to AI, which has been moving across the industry at 'breakneck speed,' Watson said BT has taken the approach of letting different groups within the company experiment with and innovate with AI.
“I can now see 50 examples of where we have teams who have put into operation AI solutions that we’ve developed. It’s absolutely all around us," he said.
Scott Petty, CTO with Vodafone, noted that AI requires a change of mindset in order to innovate fast and scale. To this end, Vodafone has invested heavily in educating everyone in the company how to use AI, creating training programs for specific roles in the business. He said it's important to “democratize” AI by providing access to AI tools and encouraging employees to use them.
AI is different
AI is a different animal for telcos — and this means a different approach. “We typically do technology in verticals,” said Petty. “That doesn’t work in the AI space because the pace of change is far too fast. We need to move to a much more horizontal platform model.”
Newman asked the two operator execs if they’re deploying AI at scale, yet. Watson said BT has been using computational AI for years. “It’s really the right solution for that piece of the process,” he said.
But in terms of GenAI, Petty said Vodafone has tens of thousands of users on certain use cases, and it’s important to focus on a limited number of use cases to start. “If you do thousands of proof of concepts, you’ll always be at the proof-of-concept level,” said Petty. “I’m confident we can build AI applications with tens of millions of users, which I would define as scale.”
Watson said one of BT’s partners — he wouldn’t divulge who — is incentivizing its staff to use AI to find efficiencies. “The approach they’re taking is: they’re offering their staff, if they can demonstrate through the use of Co-pilot or other tools that they’ve saved an hour a day, they’re going to give them 30 minutes of that back.”
In order to oversee its AI work, BT created an AI center of excellence. “We’re making sure it’s got the right guardrails in place. And experts there are understanding AI and how to handle the data,” said Watson.
One thing of concern at the DTW show is the question of whether AI will put engineers out of their jobs. But Watson said, “I still want engineers who know how a Cisco or Juniper or Nokia router works because if we’re not careful, everybody will work on the applications and we’ll forget about the network.”
Petty said, “A huge set of functions will always have humans in the loop. A Cisco engineer is a great example. An engineering AI chatbot can help them understand the configuration codes, but they still need the logic of: ‘What am I doing?’”
Catch all of our coverage from this year's DTW Ignite show here.