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SK Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, e& Group, Singtel and SoftBank plan to establish a joint venture focused on developing Large Language Models (LLMs) specifically tailored to the needs of telecommunications companies.
During the inaugural meeting of the Global Telco AI Alliance (GTAA) at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the meeting was attended by SK’s Chairman Chey Tae-won, SKT’s CEO Ryu Young-sang, Deutsche Telekom’s CEO Tim Höttges and DT’s board member for technology and innovation, Claudia Nemat; e& Group’s Group CEO Hatem Dowidar; Singtel Group’s CEO Yuen Kuan Moon, and SoftBank’s CISO Tadashi Iida.
The LLMs will be designed to help telcos improve their customer interactions via digital assistants and chatbots.
The goal is to develop multilingual LLMs optimised for languages including Korean, English, German, Arabic and Japanese, with plans for other languages like Bahasa Indonesia so that it can be deployed in Southeast Asia.
The joint venture company will be established within this year and plans to focus on deploying innovative AI applications tailored to the needs of the Global AI Telco Alliance members in their respective markets, enabling them to reach a global customer base of approximately 1.3 billion across 50 countries.
Deutsche Telekom boasts about 250 million subscribers across 12 countries, including Germany and the US. The e& Group has 169 million subscribers in 16 countries across the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, while the Singtel Group has 770 million subscribers in 21 countries, including Australia, India, and Indonesia.
Compared to general LLMs, telco-specific LLMs are more attuned to the telecommunications domain and better at understanding user intent.
By making it easier for telcos to deploy high quality generative AI models swiftly and efficiently, telco-specific LLMs are expected to help accelerate AI transformation of various telco business and services, including customer service.
The LLMs are currently being optimised with telcos’ customer service data used to fine-tune the model for telco-specific questions.
“We as telcos need to develop tailored LLM for the telco industry to make telco operations more efficient, which is a low-hanging fruit. Our ultimate goal is to discover new business models by redefining relationships with customers,” SKT’s Young-sang said.
“The Global Telco AI Alliance brings synergy to its members by allowing them to achieve more by working as a team.”
Deutsche Telekom’s Nemat added it wanted to give customers the best possible service.
“AI helps us do that. Already today, more than 100,000 customer service dialogs a month in Germany are handled by Generative AI. By integrating telco-specific large language models, our ‘Frag Magenta’ chatbot becomes even more human-centric: AI personalises conversations between customers and chatbots. And our joint venture brings Europe and Asia closer together,” she said.
e& Group global chief AI and data officer, Dena Almansoori said this was a monumental step for e& and for the Telco industry at large.
“From streamlining customer support interactions to enabling personalised recommendations, this multi-lingual LLM will revolutionise how businesses engage with customers”, Almansoori said.
“In collaboration with our Global AI Telco Alliance partners, we look forward to shaping both the present and future of customer engagement and setting new standards for efficiency and innovation across the telecommunications landscape to better serve our customers and create meaningful impact.”
Singtel’s group CEO Moon said it will be a game changer for any telecom company looking to lift its customer experience beyond limited automated responses and generic chatbot interactions.
“This multi-lingual LLM tailored for telcos will greatly expand chatbot capabilities with relevant responses to customers’ technical queries, freeing up service agents to deal with more complex customer issues and we intend to deploy this across the Singtel Group,” Moon said.
“With leading telcos from three different continents working on this innovative model, this unprecedented effort to scale AI development for the telecom industry would not have been possible had we all decided to go it alone.”
SoftBank’s EVP and CTO Hideyuki Tsukuda said it was embarking on a mission to revolutionise global communication, elevate service quality, and ignite a new era of technological innovation powered by AI.
“Together, we have the power to shape the future of telecommunications, empowering communities worldwide with seamless connectivity and boundless opportunities,” Tsukuda said.
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