As GenAI continues to transform the business landscape, we’re experiencing firsthand the emergence of technological advancements that are more rapid, more innovative, and more profound than anything else we’ve ever witnessed as a society.
The impacts of GenAI are so pervasive that it’s not just spurring a technical revolution, it’s ushering in a new age where arguably every domain – from how we work to how we live our everyday lives –will transform to some degree. While many industries have been working to reap GenAI’s benefits as quickly as possible, one industry has taken a slower approach to adoption: telecommunications. In fact, data shows only 22% of communication service providers (CSPs) have implemented GenAI solutions.
Despite telcos seemingly taking their GenAI journey at a slower pace compared to other companies in other industries who have accelerated their journeys, telecom’s steady approach isn’t the reflection of an industry that’s unable to see the technology’s benefits. Instead, it’s the result of an industry so deeply engrained in modern society, trying to strike a careful balance between honoring its core standards while also evolving to keep pace with the innovation of emerging technologies.
The impacts of GenAI usage in telecom go far beyond just the industry. Telecom is well-primed to experience immense benefits from GenAI, but the path forward requires a better understanding of the potential disruptions the tech presents and a clear view of how it will transform telecom as we know it.
GenAI in Telecom: A Classic Case of Steady Wins the Race
When technical advancements arise, industries immediately view becoming an early adopter as the initial goal. While a certain level of speediness is essential for the business landscape to keep up with our ever-changing world, it’s crucial to not lose sight of the most important consideration: the rate of implementation should never come at a cost. This is especially true for GenAI.
Telecom is a longstanding industry that is not only greatly depended upon, playing a massive role in contemporary society, but also one that can’t deviate from the truth and requires robust security. Given this, telecom can’t afford to take a “move quick, fix later” mentality with GenAI. For this industry, implementation needs to be flawless out of the gate.
With telecom being the powering source behind many of our daily experiences, the biggest challenge of GenAI has been ensuring the right data, and the right framework to support it, are in place to enable use cases. This has been a major obstacle that has heavily contributed to the industry needing to take a more cautious, and subsequently slower, approach to adoption relative to others.
Data is the foundation behind AI-powered experiences, and the quality of output from GenAI systems are directly tied to the data input that they’re trained on. In telecom, GenAI use cases are extremely high stakes and the wrong input can result in a detrimental output.
Picture a use case where a provider is using a GenAI agent to power their customer service offerings: a customer will rely on this agent to help solve for issues. Now say a customer runs into an instance where they need to fix their network; in this kind of interaction, there is no room for error. Should a hallucination occur (which was a common challenge other industries saw after their rapid deployment of GenAI) the wrong answer or action won’t just cause a minor inconvenience. Instead, it has the potential to shut down the network for hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people. The repercussions of this kind of widespread blackout would leave masses without connectivity, which many can’t afford in today’s digitally connected world. This kind of disruption isn’t small-scale; it could prevent people from having the ability to communicate and all of the sudden an attempt to solve a problem has spurred a hallucination into a national security issue.
To ensure this kind of instance is prevented, the telecom industry has had to prioritize taking preventative measures before focusing on GenAI implementation. Addressing this obstacle has required the industry to place weight behind new sets of trainings for large language models (LLMs) specific to telecom-data, which has been a major hurdle for CSPs in their GenAI journeys.
While other industries raced to set up their GenAI solutions, telecom had to focus on the backend to ensure the most accurate and secure frameworks were being developed to properly support these solutions. By launching GenAI at its own pace, and establishing the essential groundwork to enable it, telecom is now equipped to experience its innovation at an exponential rate.
How GenAI Will Reshape Telecom
Taking a look at the telecom landscape, the industry’s progression has been pretty linear. Moving from 3G to 4G to now 5G, there has been a clear-cut path forward. This linearity has driven tight competition within the industry, which up until recently, caused growth to remain stagnant.
Despite being a technology that’s external to telecom, the introduction of GenAI has the ability to change the industry’s trajectory and reignite profitability. With the right foundation in place, GenAI offers providers increasing opportunities to generate new revenue (51%), reduce time to market (40%) and improve employee productivity (39%).
As we see the rates of GenAI deployment rise, we can expect that this will also result in further changes across the industry including:
- New relationships between vendors and providers: Partnerships have always played an integral role within telecom, but GenAI will bring a new meaning to the relationships partners have with their vendors. GenAI can empower providers by generating new revenue streams and helping to reduce the time-to-market for solutions. Gaining access to these capabilities can be costly, to address this challenge we’re already seeing vendors expanding into foundation model offerings to make GenAI services more accessible for CSPs, making these vendor relationships more critical than ever.
- The telecom talent landscape: Not only will use of GenAI help to improve productivity by alleviating the burden of redundant tasks off employees, but these solutions are also powering the future of a new telecom workforce. Previously telecom has been an industry that requires a very longstanding and particular set of skills. GenAI is now re-visioning what it means to work within the field, allowing for new talent to break into the industry. GenAI can be used to equip employees with different experiences to tackle tasks that previously required a telecom background. At the same time, it will also power experts within telecom to become “super experts,” letting them step away from the more mundane tasks of their roles to focus on more strategic areas. This workforce shift will also spur a deeper focus within telecom on GenAI trainings and reskilling to ensure employees are properly utilizing the tech.
When it comes to telecom, GenAI deployments aren’t just changing how companies operate – as the base to today’s essential interactions, the technology is also sparking a broader transformation across the industry.
As the AI revolution continues, we’ve entered what is only comparable to a second Industrial Revolution. We’re not only attempting to harness the powers of a technology that is increasingly intelligent, but one that has also found a way to infiltrate essentially every possible domain. GenAI has pushed telecom to the cusp of great transformation and by taking a steady and secure approach to deployment, the industry is prepared to enter its next phase.
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