The Future of Telco LLMs: Unlocking Personalization and Automation
The Global Telecom AI Alliance (GTAA) has laid out its vision for telco-specific Large Language Models (LLMs), aiming to identify and solve telco-specific business issues using local languages, industry-specific terms, and internal business jargon. The alliance, comprising SK Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, e& Group, Singtel, and Softbank, wants to ensure that communications service providers (CSPs) benefit from future AI business models built using telco data.
“Simply adding engineering prompts with a generic AI LLM … it’s pretty painful. It requires a lot of tuning to get to consistent outcomes and accurate results, and especially with very complex use cases,” said William Woo, Group Chief Information Officer / Chief Digital Officer, Singtel.
Singtel, which is working on LLMs with Anthropic, finds that a customized telco LLM definitely outperforms a general LLM for telco-related tasks. Another aim of the alliance is to ensure that CSPs benefit from future AI business models built using telco data.
Aiming for Personalization
Customer care has been one of the first areas where telcos have used GenAI, and is an initial focus for GTAA members. An industry-specific LLM equipped with comprehensive understanding of diverse product ranges will help present personalized offers that align with customer preferences.
“We expect to provide users with a more expensive, personalized experience while simultaneously increasing the impact within the ecosystem by having various third parties join,” explained SG Chung, Chief AI Global Officer, SK Telecom.
Enabling Automation
Other telco-specific uses for GenAI include improving employee productivity, field operations, and network operations. Referring to TM Forum’s autonomous network levels, Sameer Vuyyuru, Director Global Business Development for Telecom, AWS, said: “We think generative AI can get us to Level 4 automation two to three years sooner than using traditional ML methods.”
A customized telco LLM definitely outperforms a general LLM for telco-related tasks.
GenAI can get us to Level 4 automation two to three years sooner than using traditional ML methods.
The GTAA’s founders announced a joint venture agreement to co-develop and launch a multilingual Telco Large Language Model, which will work for Korean, English, German, Arabic, and Bahasa, among other languages. Together, they will make equal investments in the initial working capital required to develop it.
The JV will look at deploying innovative AI applications tailored to the needs of the founding parties in their respective markets, which cover a global customer base of approximately 1.3 billion across 50 countries.
A multilingual Telco Large Language Model will work for Korean, English, German, Arabic, and Bahasa, among other languages.
The future of telco LLMs is promising, with the industry developing domain-specific, language-specific, and task-specific LLMs. As Sameer Vuyyuru said, “The future is going to be model-to-model interaction as much as possible. So, you’re going to have a model for network operations talking to customer operations. That is where we’re headed.”
