AI & Telecommunication
63.5% of Telecoms are investing in AI to improve their infrastructure.
Conversational AI platform will cut costs by $8Billion in next 5 years.
84% of CSPs existing workers feel that they need to change their skill sets.
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Telecom & Artificial Intelligence
Telecom is no longer limited to providing basic telephony and internet services. This industry is at the epicenter of growth led by it mobile and broadband services in the IoT era. Global IoT telecom market is likely to post CAGR >42% by 2020 with AI at its center. AI is revolutionising the way telecom operates, optimises and provides services. Telecoms are harnessing the customer Big Data through the power of AI to get actionable insights. All this for providing better customer experience, improved operations and increase in revenue.
Why Artificial Intelligence cannot be ignored?
- Network Optimisation: AI is essential to help CSPs (Communication Service Providers) build SONs (Self Optimising Networks). Operators will have an automated capability to optimise network quality based on traffic information by region and time zone.
- Predictive Maintenance: With the aid of AI the telecoms can used historical data to monitor the state of equipment, predict failure of basis of patterns and proactively fix problems.
- Virtual Assistants: Conversating AI platforms have learnt to communicate 1-to-1 so efficiently that they are to cut business expenses by $8 Billion in next 5 years.
Challenges
- Data is Not Relevant and Difficult to Access: Telecom networks generate tremendous amount of data. This will increase as we migrate to IoT and 5G. Such data is stored in Data Lakes. It requires cleaning and categorising before it is available to train an ML system.
- Lack of Clarity – What to Ask: Unlike image and voice recognition there is no “Theory of Networking” around which an AI optimisation algorithm can be built.
- Limitation to Tools: ML code only covers small fraction of the real-world ML systems. The required infrastructure around it is vast and complex.
Telecom & Internet of Things
Past decade has been tough one for the telecom industry. Despite explosive demand for network coverage the market exhibits shrinking or at max weakly growing revenue in this sector. IoT is one of the main bets for the Telecom Industry. Providers who ensure that their network infrastructure is ready for IoT platforms will have an edge. The market is set to reach 30 billion devices and generate $267 billion revenue in 2020.Telcos also have to look at IoT to improve their own operational efficiency, monitoring assets and systems and cut costs associated with increased demand. All this while they need to keep improving quality and retain customers.
Network Engineers typically do not have backgrounds on Mathematics that are essential for ML. Recruiting people with right skills is a challenge for the telecom industry. Data modeling-evaluation, software engineering, system designing, ML algorithms and libraries are Greek to existing telecom workforce. Due to lack mathematical appreciation in CSPs there is a serious skill gap. 84% of the CSP workers feel that they need to change their skill sets to be able to meet what their company and AI demands from them.