More Profitable Telcos webinar

Last week, we had the pleasure of hosting an insightful webinar on Data + Digital Twins for More Profitable Telcos, in partnership with Light Reading.

Our speakers, Abhishek Sandhir and Aidan Helmbold, are strongly experienced in Telco, AI, and data science. During this webinar, they shared crucial insights into the practical applications of Digital Twins within Telco, and how this ultimately improves profitability. 

In this blog, Abhishek kindly summarises the main themes and takeaways from the conversation. If you’re more of an auditory learner, you’ll find a recording of the webinar at the end of this post.

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Assessing the impact of AI on Telco

AI is helping decision-makers identify complexities and address them using insights drawn from a vast array of data sources, combined with human-like intelligence derived from sophisticated algorithms. When applied to Telco – a data-rich environment – AI can unlock tremendous value across the entire value chain, including network design and build, operations, and monetisation.

Telco now ranks among the top ten industries adopting AI, and the scope and scale of its deployment is continuously increasing. Functions such as fibre and wireless network planning, which traditionally depend on specialised skills and experience, are now being supported by AI. This helps accelerate the design process whilst significantly increasing the accuracy of the process.

To help assess the impact of AI in Telco, we’ll delve into some network and customer-centric use cases.

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Telco is well-suited to AI, given that it generally operates in a data-rich environment. We help our customers across four broad themes, as illustrated in the above chart:

1. Identifying the right markets to meet their specific objectives
2. Building network and process digital twins processing live data
3. Providing a platform to merge data streams, iteratively unlocking the hidden value
4. Using both source and synthesised data to build custom use cases

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Pressure on the bottom line

A quick look at Telco’s earnings reports will show the pressure on their bottom lines. In an increasingly competitive market, Telcos have to make difficult Capex and Opex decisions to stay ahead. Engineering and network deployment costs can account for up to 40% of a Telco’s Capex, so any savings that don’t compromise the output and service levels add to the bottom line.

By processing large amounts of multi-source data, AI can help in identifying the right markets at a highly granular level. This allows operators to optimise their investment in fixed line and wireless infrastructure, effectively catering to the accurately mapped demand. At the same time, they can reduce their operational costs by replicating their networks in digital twins.

At ExploreAI, we gather data from both open and proprietary sources to accurately predict the investment needed to build networks and the expected takeup rates. We account for market complexities such as local market conditions and competitive intensity.

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Identifying feasible market clusters for fibre and 5G

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Our success is based on our First Principles Thinking’, which focuses on questioning all assumptions and then building a solution from scratch. We unlock value by:

1. Identifying pockets of intelligence in your current organisation
2. Building out a ground (data) truth for the entire network
3. Identifying use cases that require integrated data for decision-making
4. Integrating into an operational platform across the value chain
5. Building a platform that becomes the springboard for innovation 

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Examples of AI applications in Telco

In the webinar recording, you’ll see examples of our AI-based work, which includes identifying and ranking market clusters according to the business objectives, designing fibre networks for an efficient rollout, improving profitability through targeted 5G deployment, and optimising contact centre operations. 

While these are only a handful of examples, we hope you find them interesting and useful in understanding the impact AI can have across the entire Telco domain.

In summary, AI helps in analysing vast amounts of data from diverse sources and deriving actionable insights from it. Well-designed AI systems mimic intelligent, effective and ethical decision-making, and improve the quality of the output as they can work with much higher volumes of data than is possible for humans.

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We would be keen to speak with you if you’re interested in exploring the use of AI in your business. Feel free to reach out to me at abhishek.s@explore.ai.

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Watch the recording

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