Where are some starting points for telco investment?
Stephen Rose, IBM’s general manager for Telco, Media, Entertainment and Distribution, recently outlined three areas where telecom network providers can begin to target investments and focus their strategies to bring AI into their operations — and all of them draw heavily on network data.
The first, he said during a series of interviews on AI within telcos, is tying together customer care and network experience, so that there is more proactive addressing of customer needs and issues, and a reduction in the gaps between service-level and operational-level agreements across the value chain. “I think that’s a huge change in the way that you can run customer care and network care, and have them harmonize between organizational functions,” Rose said.
He described the second focus area on dynamic network operations and optimization, as well as overall optimization of business operations that fall outside of the network domain: looking for opportunities to automate mundane tasks where there is a relatively easy ability to increase productivity. Rose gave the example of better integration of workflows between operators and network equipment providers (NEPs). “If you’re raising tickets today between yourself as an operator and you’ve got the Tier 1 and the Tier 2 functions that sit on the NEP side, integrating the workflows [on the operator side across data silos] and then integrating the workflows between the ecosystem players, you can suddenly start to generate insight and foresight on the way that the network is … operating, but also [how it] need to be running through [continuous integration/continuous deployment/testing, or CICDT] processes as well,” he offered.
The third, and the one he called the “most exciting”, was dynamic selling, in a self-service model, with customers having the ability to optimize their own experience. Customers, he said, should be able to look at whether they have access to the best plan they could get on and the latest innovative options that they could get access to—and do so without human intervention on the carrier side. “It should be that we use AI to figure out what is the current experience, who do you optimize that, and where in the future the consumer, whether it be B2B or B2C, should be applying themselves,” Rose said.
Looking for more insights on telcos’ use of network analytics? Check out the on-demand RCR webinar “Test, Measure, Monitor, Learn: How operators can make sense of data in a new era of observability”, featuring Verizon and Viavi Solutions. A deep-dive editorial report on the topic is available as a free download here.
