Telcos are eagerly embracing GenAI, says AWS’ Sameer Vuyyuru
LAS VEGAS—Generative artificial intelligence has applications across many verticals, and telecom is a leading one, according to Sameer Vuyyuru, head of WW business development for CSPs at AWS.
Speaking from the MWC Las Vegas keynote stage, Vuyyuru gave some insights into just how quickly the telcom industry is turning to generative AI. A new survey of more than 100 executives from AWS’ telecom customers in the U.S., Western Europe and the Asia Pacific region, conducted by Altman Solon, showed a slight lead in U.S. adoption of generative AI within telecom, and high levels of interest and some early adoption already taking place across various regions—particularly when it comes to customer service chatbots.
AWS’ survey found that among 17 use cases for GenAI in telecom, each one already had early adopters. Half of telcos reported that they plan to integrate generative AI in the next two years, if they haven’t already—moving at what Vuyyuru called “a pace unprecedented in the telco industry.”
The top five use cases that the surveyed telcos indicated had a high likelihood of being implemented were:
- Customer service chatbots
- Automated code generation, debugging and testing
- Guided employee assistance
- Personalization of products and marketing
- Content generation for products and marketing
The number one concern? Data security, privacy and governance. “For telcos to leverage generative AI for company purposes, it requires a large set of proprietary data,” AWS said in a blog post on the survey results, adding, “There is concern that proprietary company data could be embedded into the public model itself, creating intellectual property risk.”
There’s already evidence to support that concern, particularly as company employees embrace the use of GenAI without much in the way of guardrails or alternatives to public AI tools. A June report from Layer X Security found that 6% of employees have pasted sensitive data (such as source code, internal business information and personally identifiable information) into GenAI tools, with 4% saying they do so on a weekly basis.
Vuyyuru said that although telcos generate massive amounts of data, very few of them have the data governance infrastructure in place to really take advantage of generative AI–and for many, that will be the first step toward adoption.
