An expanded artificial intelligence ecosystem is rapidly emerging and shifting, with the goal of making it easier for telecommunications companies to consume and leverage generative AI.
In a discussion during the Telco AI Forum virtual event, Lilac Ilan, Nvidia’s global head of business development for the telecom industry, described the various players in that ecosystem and their roles.
The foundation of the emerging AI ecosystem is data providers, Ilan said; hyperscalers also play an important role, because they are where telcos can find both hardware and software solutions to assist with their generative AI endeavors; as do original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and original design manufacturers (ODMs) such as Dell Technologies, Lenovo and HPE. “Now, you have a little bit of a new player in that ecosystem, which is the model suppliers, the OpenAI, the Anthropic, and Meta with Llama—that ecosystem has come in. You have your data management layer, so now you have the companies like Snowflake and Databricks. … And now on top of it, there is a full, flourishing ecosystem of application providers or application builders that are using generative AI for the telco, and developing generative AI applications for the telco space.
She laid out two examples of how that AI ecosystem is working. One part of the AI ecosystem is working to embed generative AI in their native applications for telecom, so that telcos can consume gen AI easily without having to necessarily worry about GPUs, which cloud or model is being used or how it’s being customized—the vendors are working those things out, so that telcos can have gen AI as an “on-off co-pilot” option within applications, Ilan said. She pointed to examples such as ServiceNow, SAP and Amdocs who are taking this approach.
The other part of the ecosystem is seeking to support telcos who want to build their own generative AI solutions outside of vendor-specific applications; an example here is AT&T’s AskAT&T, an internal tool aimed at increasing employee productivity. That ecosystem consists of global systems integrators (GSIs) and others building bespoke solutions or bespoke applications for telcos.
Whether the AI eocsystem players aim to support embedded gen AI or bespoke gen AI, Ilan said, they are all focused on one thing.
“That whole ecosystem … is coming together … for one major goal, and that goal is to make generative AI more accessible for the telco, so it’s going to be easier for them to drive value of it,” she said.
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