The telecom industry is undergoing an unprecedented transformation. Fueled by tech advancements such as 5G, cloud computing, Internet of Things (IoT) and machine learning (ML), telecoms have the opportunity to reshape and streamline operations and make significant improvements in service delivery, customer experience and network optimization.

Key to these technologies is generative AI (gen AI), a dynamic form of artificial intelligence that leverages vast amounts of data to analyze and produce results previously unachievable with conventional methods. The catch, however, is that gen AI is highly dependent on the availability of large data sets.

Despite the potential, the telecom sector, like many traditional industries, struggles with complex, siloed data systems accumulated over decades. These legacy systems impair the industry’s ability to adopt and optimize gen AI technologies, posing a barrier to true digital transformation. For telecom companies ready to tackle these challenges, the rewards of integrating gen AI are substantial.

From enhanced self-service options to improved data discoverability, gen AI has particular relevance in telecoms. 

1. Boost customer experience 

Personalizing the customer experience by going beyond the standard advertising and support cycle can offer substantial benefits, such as meeting customer expectations more easily, maximizing customer satisfaction, and increasing lifetime value and loyalty. 

For example, gen AI has the power to transform the customer experience by enabling large-scale personalization and customer self-service, and empowering support staff to offer fast issue-resolution.  

2. Modernize network operations

It’s common for telecom network operations to be built on legacy systems and processes. While there’s a case for not fixing what isn’t broken, making the leap to gen AI-driven operations can improve network health, service performance, reliability and operational efficiency. 

For instance, by incorporating data from operational and business support systems, you can streamline and expedite operational workflows and analytics — including root cause analysis and hypothesis generation to solve network issues. 

3. Gain operational agility 

Making quicker, more accurate decisions can make all the difference in a highly competitive market like telecoms. By using gen AI, organizations can reduce operational costs while improving agility and simplifying compliance processes. 

Consider the impact that network capacity planning can have. By leveraging predictive analytics, you can automate resource allocation and optimize infrastructure management through advanced natural language processing. This leads to enhanced efficiency, scalability and adaptability in response to evolving connectivity demands. 

Gen AI can also help deliver greater supply chain resilience. By using it to analyze the impact of component shortages and regulation and compliance changes, organizations can mitigate the risk of bottlenecks before they happen.

4. Develop data-powered edge services

Edge services have become an increasingly important aspect of telecoms operations, offering key capabilities that support critical IoT technologies. 

Powerful edge services driven by data and gen AI have the potential to accelerate business operations and provide a competitive advantage. 

Gen AI presents a unique opportunity to collate, process and analyze huge data volumes quickly and accurately in a way that’s simply impossible using conventional means. This opens the door to limitless new possibilities for consumers and businesses alike. 

5. Improve energy management and sustainability

With stringent net-zero and ESG goals to meet, telecoms have a critical need to be able to track, understand and carry out energy management and sustainability actions. Gen AI has the power to make sense of large-scale data, helping organizations see the signals in the noise and take the lead. 

Breaking down data, applications and organizational silos to make way for gen AI means bringing the technology and processes to the data, rather than the other way around. When building a strategy, the most effective method is to have a single ecosystem that’s easy to use and enables cross-organization and cross-industry collaboration. 

While it’s clear there’s a significant opportunity for innovative telecom organizations to make the most of gen AI, including LLMs, intelligent applications are only as good as the data they’re trained on. 

To be truly effective, gen AI needs a single point of truth for company data that can also seamlessly and securely ingest external data and integrate with various third-party platforms.

To learn more about how gen AI can transform the telecom industry and what tools it’ll take to get there, read our The Future of Telecoms: How Gen AI Is Changing the Game (and How to Use It to Your Advantage) ebook.