Page 75 - SAMENA Trends - Jan-Mar 2024

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SKT, Deutsche Telekom, e&, Singtel, and SoftBank Corp Announce Plan to

Establish a Joint Venture

SK Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, e& Group,
Singtel and SoftBank Corp. held the
inaugural meeting of the Global Telco AI
Alliance (GTAA) at MWC Barcelona 2024
and announced their plans to establish a
joint venture. 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 & Innovation, Claudia Nemat,
e& Group’s Group CEO Hatem Dowidar,
Singtel Group’s CEO Yuen Kuan Moon, and
SoftBank’s CISO Tadashi Iida. Through the
Joint Venture Company, the five companies
plan to develop Large Language Models
(LLMs) specifically tailored to the needs of hardware such as the router, for example with customers”, said Dena Almansoori,
telecommunications companies. The LLMs (e.g. How do I do a reset?) are rarely found Group Chief AI and Data Officer, e& group.
will be designed to help telcos improve their in the general training data of the large “In collaboration with our Global AI Telco
customer interactions via digital assistants models. But it's exactly this content that a Alliance partners, we look forward to
and chatbots. The goal is to develop telco bot needs to know. So that it is able shaping both the present and future of
multilingual LLMs optimized for languages to understand, summarize and respond customer engagement and setting new
including Korean, English, German, Arabic to these specific concerns. This targeted standards for efficiency and innovation
and Japanese, with plans for additional training ensures the LLM understands the across the telecommunications landscape
languages to be agreed among the unique language and needs of telecom to better serve our customers and create
founding members. The joint venture operators, paving the way for enhanced, meaningful impact.” “This promises to be
plans to focus on deploying innovative AI personalized, and efficient customer a game changer not just for us at Singtel
applications tailored to the needs of the experiences. “We as telcos need to develop but for any telecom company out there
Global AI Telco Alliance members in their tailored LLM for the telco industry to make looking to lift their customer experience
respective markets, enabling them to reach telco operations more efficient, which beyond limited automated responses and
a global customer base of approximately is a low-hanging fruit. Our ultimate goal generic chatbot interactions. This multi-
1.3 billion across 50 countries. Deutsche is to discover new business models by lingual LLM tailored for telcos will greatly
Telekom boasts about 250 million redefining relationships with customers. expand chatbot capabilities with relevant
subscribers across 12 countries, including The Global Telco AI Alliance brings synergy responses to customers’ technical queries,
Germany and the U.S. The e& Group has to its members by allowing them to achieve freeing up service agents to deal with more
169 million subscribers in 16 countries more by working as a team,” said Ryu complex customer issues and we intend
across the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, Young-sang, CEO of SKT. "We want our to deploy this across the Singtel Group.
while the Singtel Group has 770 million customers to experience the best possible With leading telcos from three different
subscribers in 21 countries, including service. AI helps us do that. Already, more continents working on this innovative
Australia, India, and Indonesia. The Joint than 100,000 customer service dialogs model, this unprecedented effort to scale
Venture Company will be established within a month in Germany are handled by AI development for the telecom industry
this year. Compared to general LLMs, telco- Generative AI. By integrating telco-specific would not have been possible had we all
specific LLMs are more attuned to the large language models, our 'Frag Magenta' decided to go it alone,” said Yuen Kuan
telecommunications domain and better chatbot becomes even more human- Moon, Group Chief Executive Officer,
at understanding user intent. By making centric: AI personalizes conversations Singtel. “Through a powerful alliance with
it easier for telcos to deploy high-quality between customers and chatbots. And industry leaders, we embark on a mission
generative AI models swiftly and efficiently, our joint venture brings Europe and Asia to revolutionize global communication,
telco-specific LLMs are expected to help closer together,” said Claudia Nemat, Board elevate service quality, and ignite a new era
accelerate AI transformation of various Member Deutsche Telekom for Technology of technological innovation powered by AI.
telco business and services, including and Innovation. “This is a monumental Together, we have the power to shape the
customer service. The LLMs are currently step for e& and for the Telco industry at future of telecommunications, empowering
underway with customer service data large. From streamlining customer support communities worldwide with seamless
being used to fine-tune the model for telco- interactions to enabling personalized connectivity and boundless opportunities,”
specific questions. This is mainly for tariff recommendations, this multi-lingual LLM said Hideyuki Tsukuda, Executive Vice
and contract models, information on special will revolutionize how businesses engage President & CTO of SoftBank Corp.

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