How the telecoms industry views GenAI

Overwhelmed by the choice of domains in which to apply the technology and the rapid pace of its development, as well as a lack of expertise across their organizations, communications service providers (CSPs) are struggling to create a business case for GenAI.

That is one of the conclusions of a survey conducted earlier this year among global telecoms executives by consulting firm Analysys Mason and commissioned by software and services provider Amdocs. 

Nevertheless, most respondents expected GenAI to significantly impact software development, data management, monetization and network operations.

The study found that generating B2B revenue (51%) was the main driver for CSP investment in GenAI worldwide in the fourth quarter of 2023, followed by reduced time to market for new service offerings (40%) and improved employee productivity (39%).

Latin American telcos “are naturally looking at the market leaders in APEC and North America to see what they’re doing,” Amdocs CMO Gil Rosen told BNamericas at the unveiling of the study in Chilean capital Santiago.

“But we have some Latin American customers that are engaging with us in production of proofs of concepts. I visited all the big operators here in Chile and they’re all engaging in it.”

Telcos have been investing in training large language models (LLM) on their specific data for over a year now, added Rosen, who expects the industry trend to shift as vendors begin to pick up a lot of this work. 

“We come to them and show them they don’t need to train as much. Every operator will need customizations, but they can reduce the amount of time and spend they do on the LLM training versus implementing and integrating the generative AI into their telecom stack,” he said.

“A lot of the work being done right now is preparation – preparing the data, tagging the data, cleaning the data, making sure it has the input and output, and doing the training. After this foundation investment, we’ll do the use case.”

Nearly half of all survey respondents said they were seeking professional services assistance with applying GenAI to specific use cases.

(You can download the full study under the Documents box on the upper right corner of this screen.)